One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under his slipper.  He opened it and read:  “Courage, Emma, courage.  I would not bring misery into your life.”  It was Rodolphe’s letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had just blown towards the door.  And Charles stood, motionless and staring, in the very same place where, long ago, Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of dying.  At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the second page.  What did this mean?  He remembered Rodolphe’s attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained air when they had met two or three times since.  But the respectful tone of the letter deceived him.

“Perhaps they loved one another platonically,” he said to himself.

Besides, Charles was not of those who go to the bottom of things; he shrank from the proofs, and his vague jealousy was lost in the immensity of his woe.

Everyone, he thought, must have adored her; all men assuredly must have coveted her.  She seemed but the more beautiful to him for this; he was seized with a lasting, furious desire for her, that inflamed his despair, and that was boundless, because it was now unrealisable.

To please her, as if she were still living, he adopted her predilections, her ideas; he bought patent leather boots and took to wearing white cravats.  He put cosmetics on his moustache, and, like her, signed notes of hand.  She corrupted him from beyond the grave.

He was obliged to sell his silver piece by piece; next he sold the drawing-room furniture.  All the rooms were stripped; but the bedroom, her own room, remained as before.  After his dinner Charles went up there.  He pushed the round table in front of the fire, and drew up her armchair.  He sat down opposite it.  A candle burnt in one of the gilt candlesticks.  Berthe by his side was painting prints.

He suffered, poor man, at seeing her so badly dressed, with laceless boots, and the arm-holes of her pinafore torn down to the hips; for the charwoman took no care of her.  But she was so sweet, so pretty, and her little head bent forward so gracefully, letting the dear fair hair fall over her rosy cheeks, that an infinite joy came upon him, a happiness mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that taste of resin.  He mended her toys, made her puppets from cardboard, or sewed up half-torn dolls.  Then, if his eyes fell upon the workbox, a ribbon lying about, or even a pin left in a crack of the table, he began to dream, and looked so sad that she became as sad as he.

No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to Rouen, where he was a grocer’s assistant, and the druggist’s children saw less and less of the child, Monsieur Homais not caring, seeing the difference of their social position, to continue the intimacy.