“Jacquet,” said Jules, “have you attended to everything?”

“Yes, to everything,” replied his friend, “but a man had forestalled me who had ordered and paid for all.”

“He tears his daughter from me!” cried the husband, with the violence of despair.

Jules rushed back to his wife’s room; but the father was there no longer.  Clemence had now been placed in a leaden coffin, and workmen were employed in soldering the cover.  Jules returned, horrified by the sight; the sound of the hammers the men were using made him mechanically burst into tears.

“Jacquet,” he said, “out of this dreadful night one idea has come to me, only one, but one I must make a reality at any price.  I cannot let Clemence stay in any cemetery in Paris.  I wish to burn her,—­to gather her ashes and keep her with me.  Say nothing of this, but manage on my behalf to have it done.  I am going to her chamber, where I shall stay until the time has come to go.  You alone may come in there to tell me what you have done.  Go, and spare nothing.”

During the morning, Madame Jules, after lying in a mortuary chapel at the door of her house, was taken to Saint-Roch.  The church was hung with black throughout.  The sort of luxury thus displayed had drawn a crowd; for in Paris all things are sights, even true grief.  There are people who stand at their windows to see how a son deplores a mother as he follows her body; there are others who hire commodious seats to see how a head is made to fall.  No people in the world have such insatiate eyes as the Parisians.  On this occasion, inquisitive minds were particularly surprised to see the six lateral chapels at Saint-Roch also hung in black.  Two men in mourning were listening to a mortuary mass said in each chapel.  In the chancel no other persons but Monsieur Desmarets, the notary, and Jacquet were present; the servants of the household were outside the screen.  To church loungers there was something inexplicable in so much pomp and so few mourners.  But Jules had been determined that no indifferent persons should be present at the ceremony.

High mass was celebrated with the sombre magnificence of funeral services.  Beside the ministers in ordinary of Saint-Roch, thirteen priests from other parishes were present.  Perhaps never did the Dies irae produce upon Christians, assembled by chance, by curiosity, and thirsting for emotions, an effect so profound, so nervously glacial as that now caused by this hymn when the eight voices of the precentors, accompanied by the voices of the priests and the choir-boys, intoned it alternately.  From the six lateral chapels twelve other childish voices rose shrilly in grief, mingling with the choir voices lamentably.  From all parts of the church this mourning issued; cries of anguish responded to the cries of fear.  That terrible music was the voice of sorrows hidden from the world, of secret friendships weeping for the dead.  Never, in any human religion, have the