Adeline and Hortense, when they were left alone, went to sit with Lisbeth.  Hortense had such a virulent hatred of Valerie that she could not contain the expression of it.

“Cousin Lisbeth,” she exclaimed, “my mother and I are avenged! that venomous snake is herself bitten—­she is rotting in her bed!”

“Hortense, at this moment you are not a Christian.  You ought to pray to God to vouchsafe repentance to this wretched woman.”

“What are you talking about?” said Betty, rising from her couch.  “Are you speaking of Valerie?”

“Yes,” replied Adeline; “she is past hope—­dying of some horrible disease of which the mere description makes one shudder——­”

Lisbeth’s teeth chattered, a cold sweat broke out all over her; the violence of the shock showed how passionate her attachment to Valerie had been.

“I must go there,” said she.

“But the doctor forbids your going out.”

“I do not care—­I must go!—­Poor Crevel! what a state he must be in; for he loves that woman.”

“He is dying too,” replied Countess Steinbock.  “Ah! all our enemies are in the devil’s clutches—­”

“In God’s hands, my child—­”

Lisbeth dressed in the famous yellow Indian shawl and her black velvet bonnet, and put on her boots; in spite of her relations’ remonstrances, she set out as if driven by some irresistible power.

She arrived in the Rue Barbet a few minutes after Monsieur and Madame Hulot, and found seven physicians there, brought by Bianchon to study this unique case; he had just joined them.  The physicians, assembled in the drawing-room, were discussing the disease; now one and now another went into Valerie’s room or Crevel’s to take a note, and returned with an opinion based on this rapid study.

These princes of science were divided in their opinions.  One, who stood alone in his views, considered it a case of poisoning, of private revenge, and denied its identity with the disease known in the Middle Ages.  Three others regarded it as a specific deterioration of the blood and the humors.  The rest, agreeing with Bianchon, maintained that the blood was poisoned by some hitherto unknown morbid infection.  Bianchon produced Professor Duval’s analysis of the blood.  The remedies to be applied, though absolutely empirical and without hope, depended on the verdict in this medical dilemma.

Lisbeth stood as if petrified three yards away from the bed where Valerie lay dying, as she saw a priest from Saint-Thomas d’Aquin standing by her friend’s pillow, and a sister of charity in attendance.  Religion could find a soul to save in a mass of rottenness which, of the five senses of man, had now only that of sight.  The sister of charity who alone had been found to nurse Valerie stood apart.  Thus the Catholic religion, that divine institution, always actuated by the spirit of self-sacrifice, under its twofold aspect of the Spirit and the Flesh, was tending this horrible and atrocious creature, soothing her death-bed by its infinite benevolence and inexhaustible stores of mercy.