at least twenty years before science could make up the loss, and take up
and utilize the ideas of the solitary pioneer whose labors a wicked and
imbecile catastrophe had destroyed.

The genealogical tree, the only document that had remained intact, was
attached to the envelope, and Clotilde carried the whole to the table
beside the cradle. After she had taken out the fragments, one by one,
she found, what she had been already almost certain of, that not a
single entire page of manuscript remained, not a single complete note
having any meaning. There were only fragments of documents, scraps of
half-burned and blackened paper, without sequence or connection. But as
she examined them, these incomplete phrases, these words half consumed
by fire, assumed for her an interest which no one else could have
understood. She remembered the night of the storm, and the phrases
completed themselves, the beginning of a word evoked before her persons
and histories. Thus her eye fell on Maxime's name, and she reviewed
the life of this brother who had remained a stranger to her, and whose
death, two months before, had left her almost indifferent. Then, a
half-burned scrap containing her father's name gave her an uneasy
feeling, for she believed that her father had obtained possession of the
fortune and the house on the avenue of Bois de Boulogne through the good
offices of his hairdresser's niece, the innocent Rose, repaid, no doubt,
by a generous percentage. Then she met with other names, that of
her uncle Eugene, the former vice emperor, now dead, the cure
of Saint-Eutrope, who, she had been told yesterday, was dying of
consumption. And each fragment became animated in this way; the
execrable family lived again in these scraps, these black ashes, where
were now only disconnected words.

Then Clotilde had the curiosity to unfold the genealogical tree and
spread it out upon the table. A strong emotion gained on her; she was
deeply affected by these relics; and when she read once more the notes
added in pencil by Pascal, a few moments before his death, tears rose to
her eyes. With what courage he had written down the date of his death!
And what despairing regret for life one divined in the trembling words
announcing the birth of the child! The tree ascended, spread out
its branches, unfolded its leaves, and she remained for a long time
contemplating it, saying to herself that all the work of the master
was to be found here in the classi