lotilde leagued with this servant, plotting with
her against him in holes and corners, seeking her aid to set traps for
him! Now he was indeed alone; he had around him only traitresses, who
poisoned the very air he breathed. But these two still loved him. He
might perhaps have succeeded in softening them, but when he knew that
his mother urged them on, he understood their fierce persistence, and
he gave up the hope of winning them back. With the timidity of a man
who had spent his life in study, aloof from women, notwithstanding
his secret passion, the thought that they were there to oppose him, to
attempt to bend him to their will, overwhelmed him. He felt that some
one of them was always behind him. Even when he shut himself up in his
room, he fancied that they were on the other side of the wall; and
he was constantly haunted by the idea that they would rob him of his
thought, if they could perceive it in his brain, before he should have
formulated it.

This was assuredly the period in his life in which Dr. Pascal was most
unhappy. To live constantly on the defensive, as he was obliged to do,
crushed him, and it seemed to him as if the ground on which his house
stood was no longer his, as if it was receding from beneath his feet.
He now regretted keenly that he had not married, and that he had no
children. Had not he himself been afraid of life? And had he not been
well punished for his selfishness? This regret for not having children
now never left him. His eyes now filled with tears whenever he met on
the road bright-eyed little girls who smiled at him. True, Clotilde was
there, but his affection for her was of a different kind--crossed at
present by storms--not a calm, infinitely sweet affection, like that for
a child with which he might have soothed his lacerated heart. And then,
no doubt what he desired in his isolation, feeling that his days were
drawing to an end, was above all, continuance; in a child he would
survive, he would live forever. The more he suffered, the greater the
consolation he would have found in bequeathing this suffering, in the
faith which he still had in life. He considered himself indemnified
for the physiological defects of his family. But even the thought that
heredity sometimes passes over a generation, and that the disorders of
his ancestors might reappear in a child of his did not deter him; and
this unknown child, in spite of the old corrupt stock, in spite of the
long succession of