radiance. It was a sudden vision which roused her cruelly from the
slumber of old age, like some supreme chastisement, and awakened a
multitude of bitter memories within her. Had the well, had the entire
wall, disappeared beneath the earth, she would not have been more
stupefied. She had never thought that this door would open again. In her
mind it had been walled up ever since the hour of Macquart's death. And
amidst her amazement she felt angry, indignant with the sacrilegious
hand that had penetrated this violation, and left that white open space
agape like a yawning tomb. She stepped forward, yielding to a kind of
fascination, and halted erect within the framework of the door.

Then she gazed out before her, with a feeling of dolorous surprise. She
had certainly been told that the old enclosure of the Fouques was
now joined to the Jas-Meiffren; but she would never have thought the
associations of her youth could have vanished so completely. It seemed
as though some tempest had carried off everything that her memory
cherished. The old dwelling, the large kitchen-garden, the beds of green
vegetables, all had disappeared. Not a stone, not a tree of former times
remained. And instead of the scene amidst which she had grown up, and
which in her mind's eye she had seen but yesterday, there lay a strip
of barren soil, a broad patch of stubbles, bare like a desert.
Henceforward, when, on closing her eyes, she might try to recall the
objects of the past, that stubble would always appear to her like a
shroud of yellowish drugget spread over the soil, in which her youth lay
buried. In the presence of that unfamiliar commonplace scene her heart
died, as it were, a second time. Now all was completely, finally ended.
She was robbed even of her dreams of the past. Then she began to regret
that she had yielded to the attraction of that white opening, of that
doorway gaping upon the days which were now for ever lost.

She was about to retire and close the accursed door, without even
seeking to discover who had opened it, when she suddenly perceived
Miette and Silvere. And the sight of the two young lovers, who, with
hanging heads, nervously awaited her glance, kept her on the threshold,
quivering with yet keener pain. She now understood all. To the very end,
she was destined to picture herself there, clasped in Macquart's arms
in the bright sunshine. Yet a second time had the door served as an
accomplice. Where love had once passed