“You carried me thus before,” she murmured, opening her eyes.

She was very light, but burning; as I took her in my arms I felt the heat of her body.  Monsieur Deslandes entered and seemed surprised at the decoration of the room; but seeing me, all was explained to him.

“We must suffer much to die,” she said in a changed voice.

The doctor sat down and felt her pulse, then he rose quickly and said a few words in a low voice to the priest, who left the room beckoning me to follow him.

“What are you going to do?” I said to the doctor.

“Save her from intolerable agony,” he replied.  “Who could have believed in so much strength?  We cannot understand how she can have lived in this state so long.  This is the forty-second day since she has either eaten or drunk.”

Monsieur Deslandes called for Manette.  The Abbe Birotteau took me to the gardens.

“Let us leave her to the doctor,” he said; “with Manette’s help he will wrap her in opium.  Well, you have heard her now—­if indeed it is she herself.”

“No,” I said, “it is not she.”

I was stupefied with grief.  I left the grounds by the little gate of the lower terrace and went to the punt, in which I hid to be alone with my thoughts.  I tried to detach myself from the being in which I lived,—­a torture like that with which the Tartars punish adultery by fastening a limb of the guilty man in a piece of wood and leaving him with a knife to cut it off if he would not die of hunger.  My life was a failure, too!  Despair suggested many strange ideas to me.  Sometimes I vowed to die beside her; sometimes to bury myself at Meilleraye among the Trappists.  I looked at the windows of the room where Henriette was dying, fancying I saw the light that was burning there the night I betrothed my soul to hers.  Ah! ought I not to have followed the simple life she had created for me, keeping myself faithfully to her while I worked in the world?  Had she not bidden me become a great man expressly that I might be saved from base and shameful passions?  Chastity! was it not a sublime distinction which I had not know how to keep?  Love, as Arabella understood it, suddenly disgusted me.  As I raised my humbled head asking myself where, in future, I could look for light and hope, what interest could hold me to life, the air was stirred by a sudden noise.  I turned to the terrace and there saw Madeleine walking alone, with slow steps.  During the time it took me to ascend the terrace, intending to ask the dear child the reason of the cold look she had given me when kneeling at the foot of the cross, she had seated herself on the bench.  When she saw me approach her, she rose, pretending not to have seen me, and returned towards the house in a significantly hasty manner.  She hated me; she fled from her mother’s murderer.