pallor. His lips lost their rosy
color, became a pale pink, then white. And, as he was about to expire,
he opened his large eyes and fixed them on his great-great-grandmother,
who watched the light dying in them. All the waxen face was already
dead, the eyes only were still living. They still kept their limpidity,
their brightness. All at once they became vacant, the light in them was
extinguished. This was the end--the death of the eyes, and Charles had
died, without a struggle, exhausted, like a fountain from which all
the water has run out. Life no longer pulsed through the veins of his
delicate skin, there was now only the shadow of its wings on his white
face. But he remained divinely beautiful, his face lying in blood,
surrounded by his royal blond locks, like one of those little bloodless
dauphins who, unable to bear the execrable heritage of their race, die
of decrepitude and imbecility at sixteen.

The boy exhaled his latest breath as Dr. Pascal entered the room,
followed by Felicite and Clotilde. And when he saw the quantity of blood
that inundated the floor, he cried:

"Ah, my God! it is as I feared, a hemorrhage from the nose! The poor
darling, no one was with him, and it is all over!"

But all three were struck with terror at the extraordinary spectacle
that now met their gaze. Aunt Dide, who seemed to have grown taller, in
the superhuman effort she was making, had almost succeeded in raising
herself up, and her eyes, fixed on the dead boy, so fair and so gentle,
and on the red sea of blood, beginning to congeal, that was lying around
him, kindled with a thought, after a long sleep of twenty-two years.
This final lesion of madness, this irremediable darkness of the mind,
was evidently not so complete but that some memory of the past, lying
hidden there, might awaken suddenly under the terrible blow which had
struck her. And the ancestress, the forgotten one, lived again, emerged
from her oblivion, rigid and wasted, like a specter of terror and grief.

For an instant she remained panting. Then with a shudder, which made her
teeth chatter, she stammered a single phrase:

"The _gendarme_! the _gendarme_!"

Pascal and Felicite and Clotilde understood. They looked at one another
involuntarily, turning very pale. The whole dreadful history of the old
mother--of the mother of them all--rose before them, the ardent love
of her youth, the long suffering of her mature age. Already two moral
shocks had shaken h