The answer she thus gave was the answer of a conservative bourgeoise, who held that it would be more just if the inheritance should go to an illegitimate scion of the house rather than to a stranger.  Doubtless the woman, the wife, the mother within her, bled even as she herself acknowledged, but she sacrificed everything to her rancor; she would drive the stranger away even if in doing so her own flesh should be lacerated.  Then, too, it vaguely seemed to her that her husband’s son must be in some degree her own, since his father was likewise the father of the son to whom she had given birth, and who was dead.  Besides, she would make that young fellow her son; she would direct him, she would compel him to be hers, to work through her and for her.

“You wish to know how I shall employ him in the place,” she resumed.  “I myself don’t know.  It is evident that I shall not easily find the hundreds of thousands of francs which may be required.  Your figures are accurate, and it is possible that we may never have the money to buy back the property.  But, all the same, why not fight, why not try?  And, besides—­I will admit it—­suppose we are vanquished, well then, so much the worse for the other.  For I assure you that if this young man will only listen to me, he will then become the agent of destruction, the avenger and punisher, implanted in the factory to wreck it!”

With a gesture which summoned ruin athwart the walls, she finished expressing her abominable hopes.  Among her vague plans, reared upon hate, was that of employing the wretched Alexandre as a destructive weapon, whose ravages would bring her some relief.  Should she lose all other battles, that would assuredly be the final one.  And she had attained to this pitch of madness through the boundless despair in which the loss of her only son had plunged her, withered, consumed by a love which she could not content, then demented, perverted to the point of crime.

Morange shuddered when, with her stubborn fierceness, she concluded:  “For twelve years past I have been waiting for a stroke of destiny, and here it is!  I would rather perish than not draw from it the last chance of good fortune which it brings me!”

This meant that Denis’s ruin was decided on, and would be effected if destiny were willing.  And the old accountant could picture the disaster:  innocent children struck down in the person of their father, a great and most unjust catastrophe, which made his kindly heart rise in rebellion.  Would he allow that fresh crime to be committed without shouting aloud all that he knew?  Doubtless the memory of the other crime, the first one, the monstrous buried crime about which they both kept silence, returned at that horrible moment and shone out disturbingly in his eyes, for she herself shuddered as if she could see it there, while with the view of mastering him she gazed at him fixedly.  For a moment, as they peered into one another’s eyes, they lived once more beside the murderous trap, and shivered in the cold gust which rose from the abyss.  And this time again Morange, like a poor weak man overpowered by a woman’s will, was vanquished, and did not speak.