Mathieu and Marianne long remained sobbing on their knees beside the bed.  Constance stood a few paces away, silent, with an air of quivering desolation.  Beauchene, as if to combat that fear of death which made him shiver, had a moment previously seated himself at the little writing-table formerly used by Maurice, which had been left in the drawing-room like a souvenir.  And he then strove to draw up a notice to his workpeople, to inform them that the factory would remain closed until the day after the funeral.  He was vainly seeking words when he perceived Denis coming out of the bedroom, where he had wept all his tears and set his whole heart in the last kiss which he had bestowed on his departed brother.  Beauchene called him, as if desirous of diverting him from his gloomy thoughts.  “There, sit down here and continue this,” said he.

Constance, in her turn entering the drawing-room, heard those words.  They were virtually the same as the words which her husband had pronounced when making Blaise seat himself at that same table of Maurice’s, on the day when he had given him the place of that poor boy, whose body almost seemed to be still lying on the bed in the adjoining room.  And she recoiled with fright on seeing Denis seated there and writing.  Had not Blaise resuscitated?  Even as she had mistaken the twins one for the other that very afternoon on rising from the gay baptismal lunch, so now again she saw Blaise in Denis, the pair of them so similar physically that in former times their parents had only been able to distinguish them by the different color of their eyes.  And thus it was as if Blaise returned and resumed his place; Blaise, who would possess the works although she had killed him.  She had made a mistake; dead as he was, he would nevertheless have the works.  She had killed one of those Froments, but behold another was born.  When one died his brother filled up the breach.  And her crime then appeared to her such a useless one, such a stupid one, that she was aghast at it, the hair on the nape of her neck standing up, while she burst into a cold sweat of fear, and recoiled as from a spectre.

“It is a notice for the workpeople,” Beauchene repeated.  “We will have it posted at the entrance.”

She wished to be brave, and, approaching her husband, she said to him:  “Draw it up yourself.  Why give Blaise the trouble at such a moment as this?”

She had said “Blaise”; and once more an icy sensation of horror came over her.  Unconsciously she had heard herself saying yonder, in the ante-room:  “Blaise, where did I put my boa?” And it was Denis who had brought it to her.  Of what use had it been for her to kill Blaise, since Denis was there?  When death mows down a soldier of life, another is always ready to take the vacant post of combat.

But a last defeat awaited her.  Mathieu and Marianne reappeared, while Morange, seized with a need of motion, came and went with an air of stupefaction, quite losing his wits amid his dreadful sufferings, those awful things which could but unhinge his narrow mind.