I am watching Marie.  She has sunk onto the little stool, and her young, full-blooming body overflows it.  Holding her handkerchief in her teeth, she has come to arrange the pillow, and leaning over the bed, she puts one knee on a chair.  The movement reveals her leg for a moment, curved like a beautiful Greek vase, while the skin seems to shine through the black transparency of the stocking, like clouded gold.  Ah!  I lean forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appeal above this bed, which is changing into a tomb.  The border of the tragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from that profound obscurity.  I look at Marie, and look at her again; and though I knew her, it seems to me that I wholly discover her.

“I can’t hear anything now,” says a woman.

“Yes I can——­”

“No, no!” the other repeats.

Then I see Crillon’s huge back bending over.  My aunt’s mouth opens gently and remains open.  The eyelids fall back almost completely upon the stiffened gleam of the eyes, which squint in the gray and bony mask.  I see Crillon’s big hand hover over the little mummified face, lowering the eyelids and keeping them closed.

Marie utters a cry when this movement tells her that our aunt has just died.

She sways.  My hand goes out to her.  I take her, support, and enfold her.  Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry—­gently, heavily—­all the young woman’s weight.  The neck of her dress is undone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the real curve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing.

Her body is agitated.  She hides her face in her hands and then turns it to mine.  It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered the wonderful savor of her tears!

* * * * * *

The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deep sighing.  It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no one pays attention.

And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannot prevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostrated like the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me—­of herself—­of everything.  I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture—­the birth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows.  Beside this poor creature who was so blended with me, and who is falling, falling, through a hell of eternity, I am uplifted by a sort of hope.

I want to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed.  I put my hand over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman, defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink.  But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape between my fingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.

Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the dead woman’s chin.  Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp summits under the sheet; one’s eyes run along the thin rods of the shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.