Moved by that feeling of curiosity which never entirely leaves us even in moments of misfortune, Marguerite entered Lemulquinier’s chamber and found it as bare as that of his master.  In a half-opened table-drawer she found a pawnbroker’s ticket for the old servant’s watch which he had pledged some days before.  She ran to the laboratory and found it filled with scientific instruments, the same as ever.  Then she returned to her own appartement and ordered the door to be broken open—­her father had respected it!

Marguerite burst into tears and forgave her father all.  In the midst of his devastating fury he had stopped short, restrained by paternal feeling and the gratitude he owed to his daughter!  This proof of tenderness, coming to her at a moment when despair had reached its climax, brought about in Marguerite’s soul one of those moral reactions against which the coldest hearts are powerless.  She returned to the parlor to wait her father’s arrival, in a state of anxiety that was cruelly aggravated by doubt and uncertainty.  In what condition was she about to see him?  Ruined, decrepit, suffering, enfeebled by the fasts his pride compelled him to undergo?  Would he have his reason?  Tears flowed unconsciously from her eyes as she looked about the desecrated sanctuary.  The images of her whole life, her past efforts, her useless precautions, her childhood, her mother happy and unhappy, —­all, even her little Joseph smiling on that scene of desolation, all were parts of a poem of unutterable melancholy.

Marguerite foresaw an approaching misfortune, yet she little expected the catastrophe that was to close her father’s life,—­that life at once so grand and yet so miserable.

The condition of Monsieur Claes was no secret in the community.  To the lasting shame of men, there were not in all Douai two hearts generous enough to do honor to the perseverance of this man of genius.  In the eyes of the world Balthazar was a man to be condemned, a bad father who had squandered six fortunes, millions, who was actually seeking the philosopher’s stone in the nineteenth century, this enlightened century, this sceptical century, this century!—­etc.  They calumniated his purposes and branded him with the name of “alchemist,” casting up to him in mockery that he was trying to make gold.  Ah! what eulogies are uttered on this great century of ours, in which, as in all others, genius is smothered under an indifference as brutal a that of the gate in which Dante died, and Tasso and Cervantes and “tutti quanti.”  The people are as backward as kings in understanding the creations of genius.