At this moment and before all else in that audience, two persons presented, to an observer, a powerfully affecting sight.  One was Denise Tascheron.  Her foreign garments, of Quaker simplicity, made her unrecognizable by her former village acquaintance.  The other was quite another personage, an acquaintance not to be forgotten, and his apparition there was like a streak of lurid light.  The procureur-general came suddenly to a perception of the truth; the part that he had played to Madame Graslin unrolled itself before him; he divined it to its fullest extent.  Less influenced, as a son of the nineteenth century, by the religious aspect of the matter, Monsieur de Grandville’s heart was filled with an awful dread; for he saw before him, he contemplated the drama of that woman’s hidden self at the hotel Graslin during the trial of Jean-Francois Tascheron.  That tragic period came back distinctly to his memory,—­lighted even now by the mother’s eyes, shining with hatred, which fell upon him where he stood, like drops of molten lead.  That old woman, standing ten feet from him, forgave nothing.  That man, representing human justice, trembled.  Pale, struck to the heart, he dared not cast his eyes upon the bed where lay the woman he had loved so well, now livid beneath the hand of death, gathering strength to conquer agony from the greatness of her sin and its repentance.  The mere sight of Veronique’s thin profile, sharply defined in white upon the crimson damask, caused him a vertigo.

At eleven o’clock the mass began.  After the epistle had been read by the rector of Vizay the archbishop removed his dalmatic and advanced to the threshold of the bedroom door.

“Christians, gather here to assist in the ceremony of extreme unction which we are about to administer to the mistress of this house,” he said, “you who join your prayers to those of the Church and intercede with God to obtain from Him her eternal salvation, you are now to learn that she does not feel herself worthy, in this, her last hour, to receive the holy viaticum without having made, for the edification of her fellows, a public confession of the greatest of her sins.  We have resisted her pious wish, although this act of contrition was long in use during the early ages of Christianity.  But, as this poor woman tells us that her confession may serve to rehabilitate an unfortunate son of this parish, we leave her free to follow the inspirations of her repentance.”

After these words, said with pastoral unction and dignity, the archbishop turned aside to give place to Veronique.  The dying woman came forward, supported by her old mother and the rector,—­the mother from whom she derived her body, the Church, the spiritual mother of her soul.  She knelt down on a cushion, clasped her hands, and seemed to collect herself for a few moments, as if to gather from some source descending from heaven the power to speak.  At this moment the silence was almost terrifying.  None dared look at their neighbor.  All eyes were lowered.  And yet the eyes of Veronique, when she raised them, encountered those of the procureur-general, and the expression on that blanched face brought the color to hers.