“Try to question Madame de Mortsauf,” he said after a pause, “and find out what is the matter.  A woman always has secrets from her husband; but perhaps she will tell you what troubles her.  I would sacrifice everything to make her happy, even to half my remaining days or half my fortune.  She is necessary to my very life.  If I have not that angel at my side as I grow old I shall be the most wretched of men.  I do desire to die easy.  Tell her I shall not be here long to trouble her.  Yes, Felix, my poor friend, I am going fast, I know it.  I hide the fatal truth from every one; why should I worry them beforehand?  The trouble is in the orifice of the stomach, my friend.  I have at last discovered the true cause of this disease; it is my sensibility that is killing me.  Indeed, all our feelings affect the gastric centre.”

“Then do you mean,” I said, smiling, “that the best-hearted people die of their stomachs?”

“Don’t laugh, Felix; nothing is more absolutely true.  Too keen a sensibility increases the play of the sympathetic nerve; these excitements of feeling keep the mucous membrane of the stomach in a state of constant irritation.  If this state continues it deranges, at first insensibly, the digestive functions; the secretions change, the appetite is impaired, and the digestion becomes capricious; sharp pains are felt; they grow worse day by day, and more frequent; then the disorder comes to a crisis, as if a slow poison were passing the alimentary canal; the mucous membrane thickens, the valve of the pylorus becomes indurated and forms a scirrhus, of which the patient dies.  Well, I have reached that point, my dear friend.  The induration is proceeding and nothing checks it.  Just look at my yellow skin, my feverish eyes, my excessive thinness.  I am withering away.  But what is to be done?  I brought the seeds of the disease home with me from the emigration; heaven knows what I suffered then!  My marriage, which might have repaired the wrong, far from soothing my ulcerated mind increased the wound.  What did I find? ceaseless fears for the children, domestic jars, a fortune to remake, economies which required great privations, which I was obliged to impose upon my wife, but which I was the one to suffer from; and then,—­I can tell this to none but you, Felix,—­I have a worse trouble yet.  Though Blanche is an angel, she does not understand me; she knows nothing of my sufferings and she aggravates them; but I forgive her.  It is a dreadful thing to say, my friend, but a less virtuous woman might have made me more happy by lending herself to consolations which Blanche never thinks of, for she is as silly as a child.  Moreover my servants torment me; blockheads who take my French for Greek!  When our fortune was finally remade inch by inch, and I had some relief from care, it was too late, the harm was done; I had reached the period when the appetite is vitiated.  Then came my severe illness, so ill-managed by Origet.  In short, I have not six months to live.”