The tenderness which Madame Claes now testified for her children nobly concealed much that she endeavored to hide from herself.  Her children caused her neither fear nor passionate emotion:  they were her comforters, but they were not her life:  she lived by them; she died through Balthazar.  However painful her husband’s presence might be to her, lost as he was for hours together in depths of thought from which he looked at her without seeing her, it was only during those cruel moments that she forgot her griefs.  His indifference to the dying woman would have seemed criminal to a stranger, but Madame Claes and her daughters were accustomed to it; they knew his heart and they forgave him.  If, during the daytime, Josephine was seized by some sudden illness, if she were worse and seemed near dying, Claes was the only person in the house or in the town who remained ignorant of it.  Lemulquinier knew it, but neither the daughters, bound to silence by their mother, nor Josephine herself let Balthazar know the danger of the being he had once so passionately loved.

When his heavy step sounded in the gallery as he came to dinner, Madame Claes was happy—­she was about to see him! and she gathered up her strength for that happiness.  As he entered, the pallid face blushed brightly and recovered for an instant the semblance of health.  Balthazar came to her bedside, took her hand, saw the misleading color on her cheek, and to him she seemed well.  When he asked, “My dear wife, how are you to-day?” she answered, “Better, dear friend,” and made him think she would be up and recovered on the morrow.  His preoccupation was so great that he accepted this reply, and believed the illness of which his wife was dying a mere indisposition.  Dying to the eyes of the world, in his alone she was living.

A complete separation between husband and wife was the result of this year.  Claes slept in a distant chamber, got up early in the morning, and shut himself into his laboratory or his study.  Seeing his wife only in presence of his daughters or of the two or three friends who came to visit them, he lost the habit of communicating with her.  These two beings, formerly accustomed to think as one, no longer, unless at rare intervals, enjoyed those moments of communion, of passionate unreserve which feed the life of the heart; and finally there came a time when even these rare pleasures ceased.  Physical suffering was now a boon to the poor woman, helping her to endure the void of separation, which might have killed her had she been truly living.  Her bodily pain became so great that there were times when she was joyful in the thought that he whom she loved was not a witness of it.  She lay watching Balthazar in the evening hours, and knowing him happy in his own way, she lived in the happiness she had procured for him,—­a shadowy joy, and yet it satisfied her.  She no longer asked herself if she were loved, she forced herself to believe it; and she glided over that icy surface, not daring to rest her weight upon it lest it should break and drown her soul in a gulf of awful nothingness.