With short steps, as if she were leading a child, Madame Angelin brought him to an armchair near Marianne and seated him in it.  He had retained the lofty mien of a musketeer, but his features had been ravaged by anxiety, and his hair was white, though he was only forty-four years of age.  And what memories arose at the sight of that sorrowful lady leading that infirm, aged man, for those who had known the young couple, all tenderness and good looks, rambling along the secluded paths of Janville, amid the careless delights of their love.

As soon as Madame Angelin had clasped Marianne’s hands with her own trembling fingers, she also uttered in low, stammering accents, those despairing words:  “Ah! what a frightful misfortune, an only son!”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she would not sit down before going for a moment to see the body in the adjoining room.  When she came back, sobbing in her handkerchief, she sank into an armchair between Marianne and her husband.  He remained there motionless, staring fixedly with his dim eyes.  And silence fell again throughout the lifeless house, whither the rumble of the works, now deserted, fireless and frozen, ascended no longer.

But Beauchene, followed by Blaise, at last made his appearance.  The heavy blow he had received seemed to have made him ten years older.  It was as if the heavens had suddenly fallen upon him.  Never amid his conquering egotism, his pride of strength and his pleasures, had he imagined such a downfall to be possible.  Never had he been willing to admit that Maurice might be ill—­such an idea was like casting a doubt upon his own strength; he thought himself beyond the reach of thunderbolts; misfortune would never dare to fall on him.  And at the first overwhelming moment he had found himself weak as a woman, weary and limp, his strength undermined by his dissolute life, the slow disorganization of his faculties.  He had sobbed like a child before his dead son, all his vanity crushed, all his calculations destroyed.  The thunderbolt had sped by, and nothing remained.  In a minute his life had been swept away; the world was now all black and void.  And he remained livid, in consternation at it all, his bloated face swollen with grief, his heavy eyelids red with tears.

When he perceived the Froments, weakness again came upon him, and he staggered towards them with open arms, once more stifling with sobs.

“Ah! my dear friends, what a terrible blow!  And I wasn’t here!  When I got here he had lost consciousness; he did not recognize me—.  Is it possible?  A lad who was in such good health!  I cannot believe it.  It seems to me that I must be dreaming, and that he will get up presently and come down with me into the workshops!”

They kissed him, they pitied him, struck down like this upon his return from some carouse or other, still intoxicated, perhaps, and tumbling into the midst of such an awful disaster, his prostration increased by the stupor following upon debauchery.  His beard, moist with his tears, still stank of tobacco and musk.