orsaken me, and I am all alone," Jeanne would reply.

That enraged Rosalie.

"And what if he has? How about those whose children enlist, or settle in
America?" (America, in her eyes, was a shadowy country whither people
went to make their fortune, and whence they never returned). "Children
always leave their parents sooner or later; old and young people aren't
meant to stay together. And then, what if he were dead?" she would
finish up with savagely, and her mistress could say nothing after that.

Jeanne got a little stronger when the first warm days of spring came,
but she only took advantage of her better health to bury herself still
deeper in her gloomy thoughts.

She went up to the garret one morning to look for something, and, while
she was there, happened to open a box full of old almanacs. It seemed as
if she had found the past years themselves, and she was filled with
emotion as she looked at the pile of cards. They were of all sizes, big
and little, and she took them every one down to the dining-room and
began to lay them out on the table in the right order of years. Suddenly
she picked up the very first one--the one she had taken with her from
the convent to Les Peuples. For a long time she gazed at it with its
dates which she had crossed out the day she had left Rouen, and she
began to shed slow, bitter tears--the weak, pitiful tears of an aged
woman--as she looked at these cards spread out before her on the table,
and which represented all her wretched life.

Then the thought struck her that by means of these almanacs she could
recall all that she had ever done, and giving way to the idea, she at
once devoted herself to the task of retracing the past. She pinned all
the cards, which had grown yellow with age, up on the tapestry, and then
passed hours before one or other of them, thinking, "What did I do in
that month?"

She had put a mark beside all the important dates in her life, and
sometimes, by means of linking together and adding one to the other, all
the little circumstances which had preceded and followed a great event,
she succeeded in remembering a whole month. By dint of concentrated
attention, and efforts of will and of memory, she retraced nearly the
whole of her first two years at Les Peuples, recalling without much
difficulty this far-away period of her life, for it seemed to stand out
in relief. But the following years were shrouded in a sort of mist and
seemed to run one into the other