what
gives me the courage to have them all here, to put them, in all their
nakedness, in their envelopes, and still to find the courage to live!"

He stopped, and there was silence for a time. The rain had ceased, the
storm was passing away, the thunderclaps sounded more and more distant,
while from the refreshed fields, still dark, there came in through the
open window a delicious odor of moist earth. In the calm air the candles
were burning out with a tall, tranquil flame.

"Ah!" said Clotilde simply, with a gesture of discouragement, "what are
we to become finally?"

She had declared it to herself one night, in the threshing yard; life
was horrible, how could one live peaceful and happy? It was a terrible
light that science threw on the world. Analysis searched every wound
of humanity, in order to expose its horror. And now he had spoken still
more bluntly; he had increased the disgust which she had for persons and
things, pitilessly dissecting her family. The muddy torrent had rolled
on before her for nearly three hours, and she had heard the most
dreadful revelations, the harsh and terrible truth about her people, her
people who were so dear to her, whom it was her duty to love; her father
grown powerful through pecuniary crimes; her brother dissolute; her
grandmother unscrupulous, covered with the blood of the just; the
others almost all tainted, drunkards, ruffians, murderers, the monstrous
blossoming of the human tree.

The blow had been so rude that she could not yet recover from it,
stunned as she was by the revelation of her whole family history,
made to her in this way at a stroke. And yet the lesson was rendered
innocuous, so to say, by something great and good, a breath of profound
humanity which had borne her through it. Nothing bad had come to her
from it. She felt herself beaten by a sharp sea wind, the storm wind
which strengthens and expands the lungs. He had revealed everything,
speaking freely even of his mother, without judging her, continuing to
preserve toward her his deferential attitude, as a scientist who does
not judge events. To tell everything in order to know everything, in
order to remedy everything, was not this the cry which he had uttered on
that beautiful summer night?

And by the very excess of what he had just revealed to her, she remained
shaken, blinded by this too strong light, but understanding him at last,
and confessing to herself that he was attempting in this an immens