e armpit. There is some sclerosis, at least it is very
probable. One may live twenty years with that," he ended, straightening
himself.

"No doubt, sometimes," said Pascal. "At least, unless one chances to die
of a sudden attack."

They talked for some time longer, discussed a remarkable case of
sclerosis of the heart, which they had seen at the hospital at Plassans.
And when the young physician went away, he said that he would return as
soon as he should have news of the Grandguillot liquidation.

But when he was alone Pascal felt that he was lost. Everything was now
explained: his palpitations for some weeks past, his attacks of vertigo
and suffocation; above all that weakness of the organ, of his poor
heart, overtasked by feeling and by work, that sense of intense fatigue
and impending death, regarding which he could no longer deceive himself.
It was not as yet fear that he experienced, however. His first thought
was that he, too, would have to pay for his heredity, that sclerosis
was the species of degeneration which was to be his share of the
physiological misery, the inevitable inheritance bequeathed him by his
terrible ancestry. In others the neurosis, the original lesion, had
turned to vice or virtue, genius, crime, drunkenness, sanctity; others
again had died of consumption, of epilepsy, of ataxia; he had lived
in his feelings and he would die of an affection of the heart. And
he trembled no longer, he rebelled no longer against this manifest
heredity, fated and inevitable, no doubt. On the contrary, a feeling
of humility took possession of him; the idea that all revolt against
natural laws is bad, that wisdom does not consist in holding one's self
apart, but in resigning one's self to be only a member of the whole
great body. Why, then, was he so unwilling to belong to his family
that it filled him with triumph, that his heart beat with joy, when he
believed himself different from them, without any community with them?
Nothing could be less philosophical. Only monsters grew apart. And to
belong to his family seemed to him in the end as good and as fine as
to belong to any other family, for did not all families, in the main,
resemble one another, was not humanity everywhere identical with the
same amount of good and evil? He came at last, humbly and gently, even
in the face of impending suffering and death, to accept everything life
had to give him.

From this time Pascal lived with the thought that he migh