ight upon his heart; and he could not look at
the money in his desk without pain. He was haunted by the thought
of approaching want, inevitable want, and by a still more bitter
thought--the thought of his age, of his sixty years which rendered him
useless, incapable of earning a comfortable living for a wife; he had
been suddenly and rudely awakened from his illusory dream of eternal
love to the disquieting reality. He had fallen unexpectedly into
poverty, and he felt himself very old--this terrified him and filled him
with a sort of remorse, of desperate rage against himself, as if he had
been guilty of a crime. And this embittered his every hour; if through
momentary forgetfulness he permitted himself to indulge in a little
gaiety his distress soon returned with greater poignancy than ever,
bringing with it a sudden and inexplicable sadness. He did not dare to
question himself, and his dissatisfaction with himself and his suffering
increased every day.

Then a frightful revelation came to him. One morning, when he was alone,
he received a letter bearing the Plassans postmark, the superscription
on which he examined with surprise, not recognizing the writing. This
letter was not signed; and after reading a few lines he made an
angry movement as if to tear it up and throw it away; but he sat down
trembling instead, and read it to the end. The style was perfectly
courteous; the long phrases rolled on, measured and carefully worded,
like diplomatic phrases, whose only aim is to convince. It was
demonstrated to him with a superabundance of arguments that the scandal
of La Souleiade had lasted too long already. If passion, up to a certain
point, explained the fault, yet a man of his age and in his situation
was rendering himself contemptible by persisting in wrecking the
happiness of the young relative whose trustfulness he abused. No one
was ignorant of the ascendency which he had acquired over her; it was
admitted that she gloried in sacrificing herself for him; but ought he
not, on his side, to comprehend that it was impossible that she should
love an old man, that what she felt was merely pity and gratitude, and
that it was high time to deliver her from this senile love, which would
finally leave her with a dishonored name! Since he could not even assure
her a small fortune, the writer hoped he would act like an honorable
man, and have the strength to separate from her, through consideration
for her happiness, if it wer