“Mother! you are too beautiful to die—­life and health are coming back to you!” cried Madeleine.

“Dear daughter, I shall live—­in thee,” she answered, smiling.

Then followed heart-rending embraces of the mother and her children.  Monsieur de Mortsauf kissed his wife upon her brow.  She colored when she saw me.

“Dear Felix,” she said, “this is, I think, the only grief that I shall ever have caused you.  Forget all that I may have said,—­I, a poor creature much beside myself.”  She held out her hand; I took it and kissed it.  Then she said, with her chaste and gracious smile, “As in the old days, Felix?”

We all left the room and went into the salon during the last confession.  I approached Madeleine.  In presence of others she could not escape me without a breach of civility; but, like her mother, she looked at no one, and kept silence without even once turning her eyes in my direction.

“Dear Madeleine,” I said in a low voice, “What have you against me?  Why do you show such coldness in the presence of death, which ought to reconcile us all?”

“I hear in my heart what my mother is saying at this moment,” she replied, with a look which Ingres gave to his “Mother of God,”—­that virgin, already sorrowful, preparing herself to protect the world for which her son was about to die.

“And you condemn me at the moment when your mother absolves me,—­if indeed I am guilty.”

“You, you,” she said, “always your self!”

The tones of her voice revealed the determined hatred of a Corsican, implacable as the judgments of those who, not having studied life, admit of no extenuation of faults committed against the laws of the heart.

An hour went by in deepest silence.  The Abbe Birotteau came to us after receiving the countess’s general confession, and we followed him back to the room where Henriette, under one of those impulses which often come to noble minds, all sisters of one intent, had made them dress her in the long white garment which was to be her shroud.  We found her sitting up; beautiful from expiation, beautiful in hope.  I saw in the fireplace the black ashes of my letters which had just been burned, a sacrifice which, as her confessor afterwards told me, she had not been willing to make until the hour of her death.  She smiled upon us all with the smile of other days.  Her eyes, moist with tears, gave evidence of inward lucidity; she saw the celestial joys of the promised land.

“Dear Felix,” she said, holding out her hand and pressing mine, “stay with us.  You must be present at the last scene of my life, not the least painful among many such, but one in which you are concerned.”

She made a sign and the door was closed.  At her request the count sat down; the Abbe Birotteau and I remained standing.  Then with Manette’s help the countess rose and knelt before the astonished count, persisting in remaining there.  A moment after, when Manette had left the room, she raised her head which she had laid upon her husband’s knees.