him, as the price of forgiveness, my public desertion,
a rupture like her own; she will take him away from me to Switzerland or
Italy. He is beginning now to say it is ridiculous that he knows nothing
of Europe. I can guess what those words mean, flung out in advance. If
Calyste is not cured of her in three months I don't know what he may
become; but as for me, I will kill myself."

"But your soul, my unhappy child? Suicide is a mortal sin."

"Don't you understand? She may give him a child. And if Calyste loved
the child of that woman more than mine--Oh! that's the end of my
patience and all my resignation."

She fell into a chair. She had given vent to the deepest thought in her
heart; she had no longer a hidden grief; and secret sorrow is like that
iron rod that sculptors put within the structure of their clay,--it
supports, it is a force.

"Come, go home, dear sufferer. In view of such misery the abbe will
surely give me absolution for the venial sins which the deceits of the
world compel us to commit. Leave me now, my daughter," she said, going
to her _prie-Dieu_. "I must pray to our Lord and the Blessed Virgin
for you, with special supplication. Good-bye, my dear Sabine; above all
things, do not neglect your religious duties if you wish us to succeed."

"And if we do triumph, mother, we shall only save the family. Calyste
has killed within me the holy fervor of love,--killed it by sickening me
with all things. What a honey-moon was mine, in which I was made to feel
on that first day the bitterness of a retrospective adultery!"

The next day, about two in the afternoon, one of the vicars of the
faubourg Saint-Germain appointed to a vacant bishopric in 1840 (an
office refused by him for the third time), the Abbe Brossette, one of
the most distinguished priests in Paris, crossed the court-yard of
the hotel de Grandlieu, with a step which we must needs call the
ecclesiastical step, so significant is it of caution, mystery, calmness,
gravity, and dignity. He was a thin little man about fifty years of
age, with a face as white as that of an old woman, chilled by priestly
austerities, and hollowed by all the sufferings which he espoused.
Two black eyes, ardent with faith yet softened by an expression more
mysterious than mystical, animated that truly apostolical face. He was
smiling as he mounted the steps of the portico, so little did he believe
in the enormity of the cases about which his penitent sent for him; but