le to me.
I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet.
"Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he is
giving me is poison, and he knows it." She died with that thought in
her mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was
not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I
am the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed
exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me!

Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her
and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I
find it impossible! impossible!

June.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never
be undeceived.

All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first
elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet
in truth all is mystery,--miracle, around us, about us, within
ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new
birth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than
his birth from the womb of his mother?

Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health,
for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the
emotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, the
exact nature of which was not determined, in a few days assumed a
mortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he caused
Monseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the
religion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been defeated: she
prevailed in her death.

Two distinguished souls! deux etres d'elite--M. Feuillet thinks--whose
fine qualities properly brought them together. When Mademoiselle de
Courteheuse said of the heroes of her favourite age, that their
passions, their errors, did but pass over a ground of what was solid
and serious, and which always discovered itself afresh, she was
unconsciously describing Bernard. Singular young brother of Monsieur
de Camors--after all, certainly, more fortunate than he--he belongs to
the age, which, if it had great faults, had also great repentances. In
appearance, frivolous; with all the light charm of the world, yet with
that impressibility to great things, according to the law which makes
the best of M. Feuillet's [240] characters so interesting; above all,
with that capacity for pity which almost everything around him tended
to suppress; in