lotilde had just finished arranging the little garments on the table
when, lifting her eyes, she perceived before her the pastel of old
King David, with his hand resting on the shoulder of Abishag the young
Shunammite. And she, who now never smiled, felt her face flush with a
thrill of tender and pleasing emotion. How they had loved each other,
how they had dreamed of an eternity of love the day on which she had
amused herself painting this proud and loving allegory! The old king,
sumptuously clad in a robe hanging in straight folds, heavy with
precious stones, wore the royal bandeau on his snowy locks; but she was
more sumptuous still, with only her tall slender figure, her delicate
round throat, and her supple arms, divinely graceful. Now he was gone,
he was sleeping under the ground, while she, her pure and triumphant
beauty concealed by her black robes, had only her child to express the
love she had given him before the assembled people, in the full light of
day.

Then Clotilde sat down beside the cradle. The slender sunbeams
lengthened, crossing the room from end to end, the heat of the warm
afternoon grew oppressive in the drowsy obscurity made by the closed
shutters, and the silence of the house seemed more profound than
before. She set apart some little waists, she sewed on some tapes with
slow-moving needle, and gradually she fell into a reverie in the warm
deep peacefulness of the room, in the midst of the glowing heat outside.
Her thoughts first turned to her pastels, the exact copies and the
fantastic dream flowers; she said to herself now that all her dual
nature was to be found in that passion for truth, which had at times
kept her a whole day before a flower in order to copy it with exactness,
and in her need of the spiritual, which at other times took her outside
the real, and carried her in wild dreams to the paradise of flowers such
as had never grown on earth. She had always been thus. She felt that she
was in reality the same to-day as she had been yesterday, in the midst
of the flow of new life which ceaselessly transformed her. And then she
thought of Pascal, full of gratitude that he had made her what she was.
In days past when, a little girl, he had removed her from her execrable
surroundings and taken her home with him, he had undoubtedly followed
the impulses of his good heart, but he had also undoubtedly desired
to try an experiment with her, to see how she would grow up in the
different envir