During these first months, Madame Claes worked her way through this critical situation, by unwearying efforts, which love or necessity suggested to her.  She tried to learn backgammon, which she had never been able to play, but now, from an impetus easy to understand, she ended by mastering it.  Then she interested Balthazar in the education of his daughters, and asked him to direct their studies.  All such resources were, however, soon exhausted.  There came a time when Josephine’s relation to Balthazar was like that of Madame de Maintenon to Louis XIV.; she had to amuse the unamusable, but without the pomps of power or the wiles of a court which could play comedies like the sham embassies from the King of Siam and the Shah of Persia.  After wasting the revenues of France, Louis XIV., no longer young or successful, was reduced to the expedients of a family heir to raise the money he needed; in the midst of his grandeur he felt his impotence, and the royal nurse who had rocked the cradles of his children was often at her wit’s end to rock his, or soothe the monarch now suffering from his misuse of men and things, of life and God.  Claes, on the contrary, suffered from too much power.  Stifling in the clutch of a single thought, he dreamed of the pomps of Science, of treasures for the human race, of glory for himself.  He suffered as artists suffer in the grip of poverty, as Samson suffered beneath the pillars of the temple.  The result was the same for the two sovereigns; though the intellectual monarch was crushed by his inward force, the other by his weakness.

What could Pepita do, singly, against this species of scientific nostalgia?  After employing every means that family life afforded her, she called society to the rescue, and gave two “cafes” every week.  Cafes at Douai took the place of teas.  A cafe was an assemblage which, during a whole evening, the guests sipped the delicious wines and liqueurs which overflow the cellars of that ever-blessed land, ate the Flemish dainties and took their “cafe noir” or their “cafe au lait frappe,” while the women sang ballads, discussed each other’s toilettes, and related the gossip of the day.  It was a living picture by Mieris or Terburg, without the pointed gray hats, the scarlet plumes, or the beautiful costumes of the sixteenth century.  And yet, Balthazar’s efforts to play the part of host, his constrained courtesy, his forced animation, left him the next day in a state of languor which showed but too plainly the depths of the inward ill.

These continual fetes, weak remedies for the real evil, only increased it.  Like branches which caught him as he rolled down the precipice, they retarded Claes’s fall, but in the end he fell the heavier.  Though he never spoke of his former occupations, never showed the least regret for the promise he had given not to renew his researches, he grew to have the melancholy motions, the feeble voice, the depression of a sick person.  The ennui that possessed him showed at times in the very manner with which he picked up the tongs and built fantastic pyramids in the fire with bits of coal, utterly unconscious of what he was doing.  When night came he was evidently relieved; sleep no doubt released him from the importunities of thought:  the next day he rose wearily to encounter another day,—­seeming to measure time as the tired traveller measures the desert he is forced to cross.