n Pierre when, after quitting Thomas, he saw
Grandidier, who had finished his round, crossing the courtyard in the
direction of the closed pavilion, where all the grief of his
heart-tragedy awaited him. Here was that man waging the battle of life,
defending his fortune with the risk that his business might melt away
amidst the furious warfare between capital and labour; and at the same
time, in lieu of evening repose, finding naught but anguish it his
hearth: a mad wife, an adored wife, who had sunk back into infancy, and
was for ever dead to love! How incurable was his secret despair! Even on
the days when he triumphed in his workshops, disaster awaited him at
home. And could any more unhappy man, any man more deserving of pity, be
found even among the poor who died of hunger, among those gloomy workers,
those vanquished sons of labour who hated and who envied him?

When Pierre found himself in the street again he was astonished to see
Madame Toussaint and Madame Theodore still there with little Celine. With
their feet in the mud, like bits of wreckage against which beat the
ceaseless flow of wayfarers, they had lingered there, still and ever
chatting, loquacious and doleful, lulling their wretchedness to rest
beneath a deluge of tittle-tattle. And when Toussaint, followed by his
son, came out, delighted with the advance he had secured, he also found
them on the same spot. Then he told Madame Theodore the story of the
bradawl, and the idea which had occurred to him and all his mates that
Salvat might well be the culprit. She, however, though turning very pale,
began to protest, concealing both what she knew and what she really
thought.

"I tell you I haven't seen him for several days," said she. "He must
certainly be in Belgium. And as for a bomb, that's humbug. You say
yourself that he's very gentle and wouldn't harm a fly!"

A little later as Pierre journeyed back to Neuilly in a tramcar he fell
into a deep reverie. All the stir and bustle of that working-class
district, the buzzing of the factory, the overflowing activity of that
hive of labour, seemed to have lingered within him. And for the first
time, amidst his worries, he realised the necessity of work. Yes, it was
fatal, but it also gave health and strength. In effort which sustains and
saves, he at last found a solid basis on which all might be reared. Was
this, then, the first gleam of a new faith? But ah! what mockery! Work an
uncertainty, work hopeless,