fully into the nature of their loss:  their son, admired, appreciated, young, perhaps handsome, with a noble path before him, leading to fortune, possibly to fame, excites universal regret; society joins in the grief, and alleviates while it magnifies it.  But there is another sorrow of mothers who alone know what their child was really; who alone have received his smiles and observed the treasures of a life too soon cut short.  That sorrow hides its woe, the blackness of which surpasses all other mourning; it cannot be described; happily there are but few women whose heart-strings are thus severed.

Before Madame du Bousquier returned to town, Madame du Ronceret, one of her good friends, had driven out to Prebaudet to fling this corpse upon the roses of her joy, to show her the love she had ignored, and sweetly shed a thousand drops of wormwood into the honey of her bridal month.  As Madame du Bousquier drove back to Alencon, she chanced to meet Madame Granson at the corner of the rue Val-Noble.  The glance of the mother, dying of her grief, struck to the heart of the poor woman.  A thousand maledictions, a thousand flaming reproaches, were in that look:  Madame du Bousquier was horror-struck; that glance predicted and called down evil upon her head.

The evening after the catastrophe, Madame Granson, one of the persons most opposed to the rector of the town, and who had hitherto supported the minister of Saint-Leonard, began to tremble as she thought of the inflexible Catholic doctrines professed by her own party.  After placing her son’s body in its shroud with her own hands, thinking of the mother of the Saviour, she went, with a soul convulsed by anguish, to the house of the hated rector.  There she found the modest priest in an outer room, engaged in putting away the flax and yarns with which he supplied poor women, in order that they might never be wholly out of work,—­a form of charity which saved many who were incapable of begging from actual penury.  The rector left his yarns and hastened to take Madame Granson into his dining-room, where the wretched mother noticed, as she looked at his supper, the frugal method of his own living.

“Monsieur l’abbe,” she said, “I have come to implore you—­” She burst into tears, unable to continue.

“I know what brings you,” replied the saintly man.  “I must trust to you, madame, and to your relation, Madame du Bousquier, to pacify Monseigneur the Bishop at Seez.  Yes, I will pray for your unhappy child; yes, I will say the masses.  But we must avoid all scandal, and give no opportunity for evil-judging persons to assemble in the church.  I alone, without other clergy, at night—­”

“Yes, yes, as you think best; if only he may lie in consecrated ground,” said the poor mother, taking the priest’s hand and kissing it.