despair aloud, he was half
mad, he wished to kill himself, saying that he was the murderer and that
he ought to have prevented Rose from so rashly riding home through
the storm! He had to be led away and watched for fear of some fresh
misfortune. His sudden frenzy had gone to every heart; sobs burst forth
and lamentations arose from the woful parents, from the brothers, the
sisters, from the whole of stricken Chantebled, which death thus visited
for the first time.

Ah, God! Rose on that bed of mourning, white, cold, and dead! She, the
fairest, the gayest, the most loved! She, before whom all the others
were ever in admiration--she of whom they were so proud, so fond! And
to think that this blow should fall in the midst of hope, bright hope in
long life and sterling happiness, but ten days before her wedding, and
on the morrow of that day of wild gayety, all jests and laughter!
They could again see her, full of life and so adorable with her happy
youthful fancies--that princely reception and that royal procession.
It had seemed as if those two coming weddings, celebrated the same day,
would be like the supreme florescence of the family's long happiness and
prosperity. Doubtless they had often experienced trouble and had even
wept at times, but they had drawn closer together and consoled
one another on such occasions; none had ever been cut off from the
good-night embraces which healed every sore. And now the best was gone,
death had come to say that absolute joy existed for none, that the most
valiant, the happiest; never reaped the fulness of their hopes. There
was no life without death. And they paid their share of the debt of
human wretchedness, paid it the more dearly since they had made for
themselves a larger sum of life. When everything germinates and grows
around one, when one has determined on unreserved fruitfulness; on
continuous creation and increase, how awful is the recall to the
ever-present dim abyss in which the world is fashioned, on the day when
misfortune falls, digs its first pit, and carries off a loved one! It
is like a sudden snapping, a rending of the hopes which seemed to be
endless, and a feeling of stupefaction comes at the discovery that one
cannot live and love forever!

Ah! how terrible were the two days that followed: the farm itself
lifeless, without sound save that of the breathing of the cattle, the
whole family gathered together, overcome by the cruel spell of waiting,
ever in tear