enting
ceases to move. He now needed a confidant, as the hangman needs a
helper.

"Try to question Madame de Mortsauf," he said after a pause, "and find
out what is the matter. A woman always has secrets from her husband;
but perhaps she will tell you what troubles her. I would sacrifice
everything to make her happy, even to half my remaining days or half my
fortune. She is necessary to my very life. If I have not that angel at
my side as I grow old I shall be the most wretched of men. I do desire
to die easy. Tell her I shall not be here long to trouble her. Yes,
Felix, my poor friend, I am going fast, I know it. I hide the fatal
truth from every one; why should I worry them beforehand? The trouble is
in the orifice of the stomach, my friend. I have at last discovered the
true cause of this disease; it is my sensibility that is killing me.
Indeed, all our feelings affect the gastric centre."

"Then do you mean," I said, smiling, "that the best-hearted people die
of their stomachs?"

"Don't laugh, Felix; nothing is more absolutely true. Too keen
a sensibility increases the play of the sympathetic nerve; these
excitements of feeling keep the mucous membrane of the stomach in a
state of constant irritation. If this state continues it deranges, at
first insensibly, the digestive functions; the secretions change, the
appetite is impaired, and the digestion becomes capricious; sharp
pains are felt; they grow worse day by day, and more frequent; then
the disorder comes to a crisis, as if a slow poison were passing the
alimentary canal; the mucous membrane thickens, the valve of the pylorus
becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies. Well,
I have reached that point, my dear friend. The induration is proceeding
and nothing checks it. Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes,
my excessive thinness. I am withering away. But what is to be done?
I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration;
heaven knows what I suffered then! My marriage, which might have
repaired the wrong, far from soothing my ulcerated mind increased the
wound. What did I find? ceaseless fears for the children, domestic jars,
a fortune to remake, economies which required great privations, which
I was obliged to impose upon my wife, but which I was the one to suffer
from; and then,--I can tell this to none but you, Felix,--I have a worse
trouble yet. Though Blanche is an angel, she does not understand me; she