usband, whom she had
learnt to love passionately, with the frightful torment of knowing,
however, that he was doomed to perdition. And, all at once, another
memory flashed upon the young priest, the terrible memory of the day when
his father had died, killed in his laboratory by an accident, the
explosion of a retort. He, Pierre, had then been five years old, and he
remembered the slightest incidents--his mother's cry when she had found
the shattered body among the remnants of the chemical appliances, then
her terror, her sobs, her prayers at the idea that God had slain the
unbeliever, damned him for evermore. Not daring to burn his books and
papers, she had contented herself with locking up the laboratory, which
henceforth nobody entered. And from that moment, haunted by a vision of
hell, she had had but one idea, to possess herself of her second son, who
was still so young, to give him a strictly religious training, and
through him to ransom her husband--secure his forgiveness from God.
Guillaume, her elder boy, had already ceased to belong to her, having
grown up at college, where he had been won over by the ideas of the
century; but she resolved that the other, the younger one, should not
leave the house, but should have a priest as tutor; and her secret dream,
her consuming hope, was that she might some day see him a priest himself,
saying his first mass and solacing souls whom the thought of eternity
tortured.

Then between green, leafy boughs, flecked with sunlight, another figure
rose vividly before Pierre's eyes. He suddenly beheld Marie de Guersaint
as he had seen her one morning through a gap in the hedge dividing the
two gardens. M. de Guersaint, who belonged to the petty Norman
_noblesse_, was a combination of architect and inventor; and he was at
that time busy with a scheme of model dwellings for the poor, to which
churches and schools were to be attached; an affair of considerable
magnitude, planned none too well, however, and in which, with his
customary impetuosity, the lack of foresight of an imperfect artist, he
was risking the three hundred thousand francs that he possessed. A
similarity of religious faith had drawn Madame de Guersaint and Madame
Froment together; but the former was altogether a superior woman,
perspicuous and rigid, with an iron hand which alone prevented her
household from gliding to a catastrophe; and she was bringing up her two
daughters, Blanche and Marie, in principles of narr