naticism of this woman, which had made her take part in a crime,
felt inexpressibly sad at this desertion. When she was gathering up the
fragments of the papers, however, before returning to the bedroom, she
had a thrill of joy, on suddenly seeing the genealogical tree, which
the two women had not perceived, lying unharmed on the table. It was the
only entire document saved from the wreck. She took it and locked it,
with the half-consumed fragments, in the bureau in the bedroom.

But when she found herself again in this august chamber a great emotion
took possession of her. What supreme calm, what immortal peace, reigned
here, beside the savage destruction that had filled the adjoining room
with smoke and ashes. A sacred serenity pervaded the obscurity; the two
tapers burned with a pure, still, unwavering flame. Then she saw that
Pascal's face, framed in his flowing white hair and beard, had become
very white. He slept with the light falling upon him, surrounded by a
halo, supremely beautiful. She bent down, kissed him again, felt on her
lips the cold of the marble face, with its closed eyelids, dreaming its
dream of eternity. Her grief at not being able to save the work which he
had left to her care was so overpowering that she fell on her knees and
burst into a passion of sobs. Genius had been violated; it seemed to her
as if the world was about to be destroyed in this savage destruction of
a whole life of labor.

XIV.

In the study Clotilde was buttoning her dress, holding her child, whom
she had been nursing, still in her lap. It was after lunch, about
three o'clock on a hot sunny day at the end of August, and through the
crevices of the carefully closed shutters only a few scattered sunbeams
entered, piercing the drowsy and warm obscurity of the vast apartment.
The rest and peace of the Sunday seemed to enter and diffuse itself
in the room with the last sounds of the distant vesper bell. Profound
silence reigned in the empty house in which the mother and child were to
remain alone until dinner time, the servant having asked permission to
go see a cousin in the faubourg.

For an instant Clotilde looked at her child, now a big boy of three
months. She had been wearing mourning for Pascal for almost ten
months--a long and simple black gown, in which she looked divinely
beautiful, with her tall, slender figure and her sad, youthful face
surrounded by its aureole of fair hair. And although she could not
smile,