“As the illness increased, the words of this poor woman, once so gentle, have grown bitter,” said the Abbe.  “She calls on earth to keep her, instead of asking God to take her; then she repents these murmurs against the divine decree.  Such alternations of feeling rend her heart and make the struggle between body and soul most horrible.  Often the body triumphs.  ‘You have cost me dear,’ she said one day to Jacques and Madeleine; but in a moment, recalled to God by the look on my face, she turned to Madeleine with these angelic words, ’The happiness of others is the joy of those who cannot themselves be happy,’—­and the tone with which she said them brought tears to my eyes.  She falls, it is true, but each time that her feet stumble she rises higher towards heaven.”

Struck by the tone of the successive intimations chance had sent me, and which in this great concert of misfortunes were like a prelude of mournful modulations to a funereal theme, the mighty cry of expiring love, I cried out:  “Surely you believe that this pure lily cut from earth will flower in heaven?”

“You left her still a flower,” he answered, “but you will find her consumed, purified by the forces of suffering, pure as a diamond buried in the ashes.  Yes, that shining soul, angelic star, will issue glorious from the clouds and pass into the kingdom of the Light.”

As I pressed the hand of the good evangelist, my heart overflowing with gratitude, the count put his head, now entirely white, out of the door and immediately sprang towards me with signs of surprise.

“She was right!  He is here!  ‘Felix, Felix, Felix has come!’ she kept crying.  My dear friend,” he continued, beside himself with terror, “death is here.  Why did it not take a poor madman like me with one foot in the grave?”

I walked towards the house summoning my courage, but on the threshold of the long antechamber which crossed the house and led to the lawn, the Abbe Birotteau stopped me.

“Madame la comtesse begs you will not enter at present,” he said to me.

Giving a glance within the house I saw the servants coming and going, all busy, all dumb with grief, surprised perhaps by the orders Manette gave them.

“What has happened?” cried the count, alarmed by the commotion, as much from fear of the coming event as from the natural uneasiness of his character.

“Only a sick woman’s fancy,” said the abbe.  “Madame la comtesse does not wish to receive monsieur le vicomte as she now is.  She talks of dressing; why thwart her?”

Manette came in search of Madeleine, whom I saw leave the house a few moments after she had entered her mother’s room.  We were all, Jacques and his father, the two abbes and I, silently walking up and down the lawn in front of the house.  I looked first at Montbazon and then at Azay, noticing the seared and yellow valley which answered in its mourning (as it ever did on all occasions) to the feelings of my heart.  Suddenly I beheld the dear “mignonne” gathering the autumn flowers, no doubt to make a bouquet at her mother’s bidding.  Thinking of all which that signified, I was so convulsed within me that I staggered, my sight was blurred, and the two abbes, between whom I walked, led me to the wall of a terrace, where I sat for some time completely broken down but not unconscious.