Veronique was now placed on a sofa while the bed was being made.  The doctors spoke together in a low voice.  Madame Sauviat and Aline made the bed.  The faces of the two women were full of anguish; their hearts were wrung by the thought, “We are making her bed for the last time —­she will die here!”

The consultation was not long.  But Bianchon exacted at the outset that Aline should, in spite of the patient’s resistance, cut off the hair shirt and put on a night-dress.  The doctors returned to the salon while this was being done.  When Aline passed them carrying the instrument of torture wrapped in a napkin, she said:—­

“Madame’s body is one great wound.”

The doctors returned to the bedroom.

“Your will is stronger than that of Napoleon, madame,” said Bianchon, after asking a few questions, to which Veronique replied very clearly.  “You keep your mind and your faculties in the last stages of a disease which robbed the Emperor of his brilliant intellect.  From what I know of you I think I ought to tell you the truth.”

“I implore you to do so,” she said.  “You are able to estimate what strength remains to me; and I have need of all my vigor for a few hours.”

“Think only of your salvation,” replied Bianchon.

“If God has given me grace to die in possession of all my faculties,” she said with a celestial smile, “be sure that this favor will be used to the glory of his Church.  The possession of my mind and senses is necessary to fulfil a command of God, whereas Napoleon had accomplished all his destiny.”

The doctors looked at each other in astonishment at hearing these words, said with as much ease as though Madame Graslin were still presiding in her salon.

“Ah! here is the doctor who is to cure me,” she said presently, when the archbishop, summoned by Roubaud, entered the room.

She collected all her strength and rose to a sitting posture, in order to bow graciously to Monsieur Bianchon, and beg him to accept something else than money for the good news he gave her.  She said a few words in her mother’s ear, and Madame Sauviat immediately led away the doctors; then Veronique requested the archbishop to postpone their interview till the rector could come to her, expressing a wish to rest for a while.  Aline watched beside her.

At midnight Madame Graslin awoke, and asked for the archbishop and rector, whom Aline silently showed her close at hand, praying for her.  She made a sign dismissing her mother and the maid, and, at another sign, the two priests came to the bedside.

“Monseigneur, and you, my dear rector,” she said, “will hear nothing you do not already know.  You were the first, Monseigneur, to cast your eyes into my inner self; you read there nearly all my past; and what you read sufficed you.  My confessor, that guardian angel whom heaven placed near me, knows more; I have told him all.  You, whose minds are enlightened by the spirit of the Church, I wish to consult you as to the manner in which I ought as a true Christian to leave this life.  You, austere and saintly spirits, think you that if God deigns to pardon one whose repentance is the deepest, the most absolute, that ever shook a human soul, think you that even then I have made my full expiation here below?”