longer seeing her elder son, who had gone away, swayed by other
ideas than her own, bent on breaking off all family intercourse since his
brother intended to enter the Church. It was said that Guillaume, a
chemist of great talent, like his father, but at the same time a
Bohemian, addicted to revolutionary dreams, was living in a little house
in the suburbs, where he devoted himself to the dangerous study of
explosive substances; and folks added that he was living with a woman who
had come no one knew whence. This it was which had severed the last tie
between himself and his mother, all piety and propriety. For three years
Pierre had not once seen Guillaume, whom in his childhood he had
worshipped as a kind, merry, and fatherly big brother.

But there came an awful pang to his heart--he once more beheld his mother
lying dead. This again was a thunderbolt, an illness of scarce three
days' duration, a sudden passing away, as in the case of Madame de
Guersaint. One evening, after a wild hunt for the doctor, he had found
her motionless and quite white. She had died during his absence; and his
lips had ever retained the icy thrill of the last kiss that he had given
her. Of everything else--the vigil, the preparations, the funeral--he
remembered nothing. All that had become lost in the black night of his
stupor and grief, grief so extreme that he had almost died of it--seized
with shivering on his return from the cemetery, struck down by a fever
which during three weeks had kept him delirious, hovering between life
and death. His brother had come and nursed him and had then attended to
pecuniary matters, dividing the little inheritance, leaving him the house
and a modest income and taking his own share in money. And as soon as
Guillaume had found him out of danger he had gone off again, once more
vanishing into the unknown. But then through what a long convalescence
he, Pierre, had passed, buried as it were in that deserted house. He had
done nothing to detain Guillaume, for he realised that there was an abyss
between them. At first the solitude had brought him suffering, but
afterwards it had grown very pleasant, whether in the deep silence of the
rooms which the rare noises of the street did not disturb, or under the
screening, shady foliage of the little garden, where he could spend whole
days without seeing a soul. His favourite place of refuge, however, was
the old laboratory, his father's cabinet, which his mother for twe