Thus, to the tortures of the heart which Madame Claes had borne for two years—­one following the other with cumulative suffering—­was now added a dreadful and ceaseless fear which made the future terrifying.  Women have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous.  Why do they fear so much more than they hope in matters that concern the interests of this life?  Why is their faith given only to religious ideas of a future existence?  Why do they so ably foresee the catastrophes of fortune and the crises of fate?  Perhaps the sentiment which unites them to the men they love gives them a sense by which they weigh force, measure faculties, understand tastes, passions, vices, virtues.  The perpetual study of these causes in the midst of which they live gives them, no doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing effects in all possible relations of earthly life.  What they see of the present enables them to judge of the future with an intuitive ability explained by the perfection of their nervous system, which allows them to seize the lightest indications of thought and feeling.  Their whole being vibrates in communion with great moral convulsions.  Either they feel, or they see.

Now, although separated from her husband for over two years, Madame Claes foresaw the loss of their property.  She fully understood the deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute indifference.  But what was he really seeking?  Up to this time maternal feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this woman that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had never come between them.  Suddenly she found herself at times more mother than wife, though hitherto she had been more wife than mother.  However ready she had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her children to the man who had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to whom she was still the only woman in the world, the remorse she felt for the weakness of her maternal love threw her into terrible alternations of feeling.  As a wife, she suffered in heart; as a mother, through her children; as a Christian, for all.

She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul.  Her husband, sole arbiter of the family fate, was the master by whose will it must be guided; he was responsible to God only.  Besides, could she reproach him for the use he now made of his fortune, after the disinterestedness he had shown to her for many happy years?  Was she to judge his purposes?  And yet her conscience, in keeping with the spirit of the law, told her that parents were the depositaries and guardians of property, and possessed no right to alienate the material welfare of the children.  To escape replying to such stern questions she preferred to shut her eyes, like one who refuses to see the abyss into whose depths he knows he is about to fall.