Monseigneur,—­I have the honor to inclose to your Excellency my resignation.  I venture to hope that you still remember hearing me say that I left my honor in your hands, and that everything, for me, depended on my being able to give you an immediate explanation.

This explanation I have vainly sought to give.  To-day it would, perhaps, be useless; for a fragment of my work relating to the administration, stolen and misused, has gone the rounds of the offices and is misinterpreted by hatred; in consequence, I find myself compelled to resign, under the tacit condemnation of my superiors.

Your Excellency may have thought, on the morning when I first sought to speak with you, that my purpose was to ask for my promotion, when, in fact, I was thinking only of the glory and usefulness of your ministry and of the public good.  It is all-important, I think, to correct that impression.

Then followed the usual epistolary formulas.

It was half-past seven in the morning when the man consummated the sacrifice of his ideas; he burned everything, the toil of years.  Fatigued by the pressure of thought, overcome by mental suffering, he fell asleep with his head on the back of his armchair.  He was wakened by a curious sensation, and found his hands covered with his wife’s tears and saw her kneeling before him.  Celestine had read the resignation.  She could measure the depth of his fall.  They were now to be reduced to live on four thousand francs a year; and that day she had counted up her debts,—­they amounted to something like thirty-two thousand francs!  The most ignoble of all wretchedness had come upon them.  And that noble man who had trusted her was ignorant that she had abused the fortune he had confided to her care.  She was sobbing at his feet, beautiful as the Magdalen.

“My cup is full,” cried Xavier, in terror.  “I am dishonored at the ministry, and dishonored—­”

The light of her pure honor flashed from Celestine’s eyes; she sprang up like a startled horse and cast a fulminating glance at Rabourdin.

“I!  I!” she said, on two sublime tones.  “Am I a base wife?  If I were, you would have been appointed.  But,” she added mournfully, “it is easier to believe that than to believe what is the truth.”

“Then what is it?” said Rabourdin.

“All in three words,” she said; “I owe thirty thousand francs.”

Rabourdin caught his wife to his heart with a gesture of almost frantic joy, and seated her on his knee.

“Take comfort, dear,” he said, in a tone of voice so adorably kind that the bitterness of her grief was changed to something inexpressibly tender.  “I too have made mistakes; I have worked uselessly for my country when I thought I was being useful to her.  But now I mean to take another path.  If I had sold groceries we should now be millionaires.  Well, let us be grocers.  You are only twenty-eight, dear angel; in ten years you shall recover the luxury that you love, which we must needs renounce for a short time.  I, too, dear heart, am not a base or common husband.  We will sell our farm; its value has increased of late.  That and the sale of our furniture will pay my debts.”