“God be praised! you are still alive!” he cried, raising her.

A glass vessel had broken into fragments over Madame Claes, who saw her husband standing by her, pale, terrified, and almost livid.

“My dear, I forbade you to come here,” he said, sitting down on the stairs, as though prostrated.  “The saints have saved your life!  By what chance was it that my eyes were on the door when you opened it?  We have just escaped death.”

“Then I might have been happy!” she exclaimed.

“My experiment has failed,” continued Balthazar.  “You alone could I forgive for that terrible disappointment.  I was about to decompose nitrogen.  Go back to your own affairs.”

Balthazar re-entered the laboratory and closed the door.

“Decompose nitrogen!” said the poor woman as she re-entered her chamber, and burst into tears.

The phrase was unintelligible to her.  Men, trained by education to have a general conception of everything, have no idea how distressing it is for a woman to be unable to comprehend the thought of the man she loves.  More forbearing than we, these divine creatures do not let us know when the language of their souls is not understood by us; they shrink from letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and hide their pain as gladly as they silence their wishes:  but, having higher ambitions in love than men, they desire to wed not only the heart of a husband, but his mind.

To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which absorbed her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty of a rival might have caused.  The struggle of woman against woman gives to her who loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a mortification like this only proved Madame Claes’s powerlessness and humiliated the feelings by which she lived.  She was ignorant; and she had reached a point where her ignorance parted her from her husband.  Worse than all, last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he was often in danger—­near her, yet far away, and she might not share, nor even know, his peril.  Her position became, like hell, a moral prison from which there was no issue, in which there was no hope.  Madame Claes resolved to know at least the outward attractions of this fatal science, and she began secretly to study chemistry in the books.  From this time the family became, as it were, cloistered.

Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which we find it at the moment when this history begins.

The situation grew daily more complicated.  Like all passionate women, Madame Claes was disinterested.  Those who truly love know that considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are reluctantly associated with them.  Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand francs upon his property.  The apparent authenticity of the transaction, the rumors and conjectures spread through the town, forced Madame Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband’s notary and, disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret anxieties or let him guess them, and even ask her the humiliating question,—­