there is no danger, she is very
gentle!"

The grandmother, Adelaide Fouque, whom her grandchildren, a whole swarm
of descendants, called by the pet name of Aunt Dide, did not even turn
her head at the noise. In her youth hysterical troubles had unbalanced
her mind. Of an ardent and passionate nature and subject to nervous
attacks, she had yet reached the great age of eighty-three when a
dreadful grief, a terrible moral shock, destroyed her reason. At that
time, twenty-one years before, her mind had ceased to act; it had become
suddenly weakened without the possibility of recovery. And now, at the
age of 104 years, she lived here as if forgotten by the world, a
quiet madwoman with an ossified brain, with whom insanity might remain
stationary for an indefinite length of time without causing death. Old
age had come, however, and had gradually atrophied her muscles. Her
flesh was as if eaten away by age. The skin only remained on her bones,
so that she had to be carried from her chair to her bed, for it had
become impossible for her to walk or even to move. And yet she held
herself erect against the back of her chair, a yellow, dried-up
skeleton--like an ancient tree of which the bark only remains--with only
her eyes still living in her thin, long visage, in which the wrinkles
had been, so to say, worn away. She was looking fixedly at Charles.

Clotilde approached her a little tremblingly.

"Aunt Dide, it is we; we have come to see you. Don't you know me, then?
Your little girl who comes sometimes to kiss you."

But the madwoman did not seem to hear. Her eyes remained fixed upon the
boy, who was finishing cutting out a picture--a purple king in a golden
mantle.

"Come, mamma," said Macquart, "don't pretend to be stupid. You may very
well look at us. Here is a gentleman, a grandson of yours, who has come
from Paris expressly to see you."

At this voice Aunt Dide at last turned her head. Her clear,
expressionless eyes wandered slowly from one to another, then rested
again on Charles with the same fixed look as before.

They all shivered, and no one spoke again.

"Since the terrible shock she received," explained Pascal in a low
voice, "she has been that way; all intelligence, all memory seem
extinguished in her. For the most part she is silent; at times she pours
forth a flood of stammering and indistinct words. She laughs and cries
without cause, she is a thing that nothing affects. And yet I should
not venture to