I listened
myself, but I couldn't hear anything at all.'

The doctor went upstairs. The room had not been disturbed. Only a
window had been opened. There the withered flowers, stifled by their own
perfumes, exhaled but the faint odour of dead beauty. Within the alcove,
however, there still hung an asphyxiating warmth, which seemed to
trickle into the room and gradually disperse in tiny puffs. Albine,
snowy-pale, with her hands upon her heart and a smile playing over her
face, lay sleeping on her couch of hyacinths and tuberoses. And she
was quite happy, since she was quite dead. Standing by the bedside,
the doctor gazed at her for a long time, with a keen expression such as
comes into the eyes of scientists who attempt to work resurrections. But
he did not even disturb her clasped hands. He kissed her brow, on the
spot where her latent maternity had already set a slight shadow. Below,
in the garden, Jeanbernat was still driving his spade into the ground in
heavy, regular fashion.

A quarter of an hour later, however, the old man came upstairs. He had
completed his work. He found the doctor seated by the bedside, buried
in such a deep reverie that he did not seem conscious of the heavy tears
that were trickling down his cheeks.

The two men only glanced at each other. Then, after an interval of
silence, Jeanbernat slowly said:

'Well, was I not right? There is nothing, nothing, nothing. It is all
mere nonsense.'

He remained standing and began to pick up the roses that had fallen from
the bed, throwing them, one by one, upon Albine's skirts.

'The flowers,' he said, 'live only for a day, while the rough nettles,
like me, wear out the very stones amidst which they spring.... Now it's
all over; I can kick the bucket; I am nearly distracted. My last ray of
sunlight has been snuffed out. It's all nonsense, as I said before.'

He threw himself upon one of the chairs in his turn. He did not shed
a tear; he bore himself with rigid despair, like some automaton whose
mechanism is broken. Mechanically he reached out his hand and took a
book that lay on the little table strewn with violets. It was one of the
books stored away in the loft, an odd volume of Holbach,* which he had
been reading since the morning, while watching by Albine's body. As the
doctor still remained silent, buried in distressful thought, he began to
turn its pages over. But a sadden idea occurred to him.

* Doubtless Holbach's now forgotten _Catechis