“What a pretty child!” murmured Madame Angelin.  “Those little ones are like nosegays; they bring brightness and freshness wherever they come.”

Constance for her part had been dazzled.  All at once, amid the semi-obscurity, starred by the flames of the tapers, amid the deathly atmosphere, which the odor of the roses rendered the more oppressive, that laughing child had set a semblance of budding springtime, the fresh, bright atmosphere of a long promise of life.  And it typified the victory of fruitfulness; it was the child’s child, it was Marianne reviving in her son’s daughter.  A grandmother already, and she was only forty-one years old!  Marianne had smiled at that thought.  But the hatchet-stroke rang out yet more frightfully in Constance’s heart.  In her case the tree was cut down to its very root, the sole scion had been lopped off, and none would ever sprout again.

For yet another moment she remained alone amid that nothingness, in that room where lay her son’s remains.  Then she made up her mind and passed into the drawing-room, with the air of a frozen spectre.  They all rose, kissed her, and shivered as their lips touched her cold cheeks, which her blood was unable to warm.  Profound compassion wrung them, so frightful was her calmness.  And they sought kind words to say to her, but she curtly stopped them.

“It is all over,” said she; “there is nothing to be said.  Everything is ended, quite ended.”

Madame Angelin sobbed, Angelin himself wiped his poor fixed, blurred eyes.  Marianne and Mathieu shed tears while retaining Constance’s hands in theirs.  And she, rigid and still unable to weep, refused consolation, repeating in monotonous accents:  “It is finished; nothing can give him back to me.  Is it not so?  And thus there remains nothing; all is ended, quite ended.”

She needed to be brave, for visitors would soon be arriving in a stream.  But a last stab in the heart was reserved for her.  Beauchene, who since her arrival had begun to cry again, could no longer see to write.  Moreover, his hand trembled, and he had to leave the writing-table and fling himself into an armchair, saying to Blaise:  “There sit down there, and continue to write for me.”

Then Constance saw Blaise seat himself at her son’s writing-table, in his place, dip his pen in the inkstand and begin to write with the very same gesture that she had so often seen Maurice make.  That Blaise, that son of the Froments!  What! her dear boy was not yet buried, and a Froment already replaced him, even as vivacious, fast-growing plants overrun neighboring barren fields.  That stream of life flowing around her, intent on universal conquest, seemed yet more threatening; grandmothers still bore children, daughters suckled already, sons laid hands upon vacant kingdoms.  And she remained alone; she had but her unworthy, broken-down, worn-out husband beside her; while Morange, the maniac, incessantly walking to and fro, was like the symbolical spectre of human distress, one whose heart and strength and reason had been carried away in the frightful death of his only daughter.  And not a sound came from the cold and empty works; the works themselves were dead.