In the sorrow of bereavement Marguerite discovered that she possessed two friends—­Pierquin the notary, and Emmanuel de Solis.  Pierquin thought it would be a suitable thing to save the wreckage of the estate and marry the beautiful Marguerite, whose family was doubly noble.  Emmanuel offered to prepare Marguerite’s brothers for college, with a tact and a charm which declared a fine nature.  Pierquin was a man of business turned lover.  Emmanuel was a lover turned by misfortune into a man of action.

IV.—­The Hour of Darkness

For some considerable time Balthazar avoided experimental chemistry, and confined himself to theoretical speculations.  He took long walks on the ramparts; was gloomy, restless, and preoccupied at home.  Marguerite endeavoured to distract his thoughts.  One day the old servant, Martha, said to her:  “All is over with us; master is on the road to hell again!” And she pointed to clouds of smoke issuing from the laboratory chimney.  Marguerite lived as carefully as a nun; all expenses were cut down.  She denied herself ordinary comforts to prepare for the crash.  Thanks to Emmanuel, the boys were now advancing in their studies, and their future was at least unclouded.  But Balthazar had developed the gambler’s recklessness.  He sold a forest; he mortgaged his house and silver; he had no more food than a nigger who sells his wife for a glass of brandy in the morning, and weeps over his loss at night.  Once Marguerite spoke to her father.  She acknowledged that he was master, that his children would obey him at all costs; but he must know that they scarcely had bread in the house.

“Bread!” he cried; “no bread in the house of a Claes!  Where is all our property, then?”

She told him how he had sold everything.

“Then, how do we live?”

She held up her needle.

Time went on, and fresh debts hammered at the door of the Maison Claes.  At last Marguerite was obliged to face her father, and charge him with madness.

“Madness!” he cried, firing up and springing to his feet.  There was something so majestic and commanding in his attitude that made Marguerite tremble at his feet.  “Your mother would never have used that word; she always attached due importance to my scientific researches.”

She could not bear his reproaches, and fled from him.  She felt that the time had come, for they were now on the verge of beggary, to break the seal of her mother’s letter.  That letter expressed the most divine love, praying that God would permit her spirit to be with Marguerite while she read the words of this last message; and it told her that the Abbe Solis, if living, or his nephew, held for her a sum of a hundred and seventy thousand francs, and on this sum she must live, and leave her father if he refused to abandon his researches.  “I could never have said these words,” Josephine had written; “not even on the brink of the grave.”  And she entreated her child to be reverent in withstanding