s icy heap
of papers, these cold pages of manuscript, to which he had sacrificed
the love of woman, and which he tried to love sufficiently to be able to
forget everything else for them.

Pascal, now that Clotilde was no longer there, threw himself eagerly
into work, trying to submerge himself in it, to lose himself in it. If
he secluded himself, if he did not set foot even in the garden, if
he had had the strength, one day when Martine came up to announce Dr.
Ramond, to answer that he would not receive him, he had, in this bitter
desire for solitude, no other aim than to kill thought by incessant
labor. That poor Ramond, how gladly he would have embraced him! for
he divined clearly the delicacy of feeling that had made him hasten
to console his old master. But why lose an hour? Why risk emotions and
tears which would leave him so weak? From daylight he was at his table,
he spent at it his mornings and his afternoons, extended often into the
evening after the lamp was lighted, and far into the night. He wished
to put his old project into execution--to revise his whole theory
of heredity, employing the documents furnished by his own family to
establish the laws according to which, in a certain group of human
beings, life is distributed and conducted with mathematical precision
from one to another, taking into account the environment--a vast bible,
the genesis of families, of societies, of all humanity. He hoped that
the vastness of such a plan, the effort necessary to develop so colossal
an idea, would take complete possession of him, restoring to him his
health, his faith, his pride in the supreme joy of the accomplished
work. But it was in vain that he threw himself passionately,
persistently, without reserve, into his work; he succeeded only in
fatiguing his body and his mind, without even being able to fix his
thoughts or to put his heart into his work, every day sicker and more
despairing. Had work, then, finally lost its power? He whose life
had been spent in work, who had regarded it as the sole motor, the
benefactor, and the consoler, must he then conclude that to love and
to be loved is beyond all else in the world? Occasionally he would
have great thoughts, he continued to sketch out his new theory of the
equilibrium of forces, demonstrating that what man receives in sensation
he should return in action. How natural, full, and happy would life
be if it could be lived entire, performing its functions like a
wel