lied armies, put the chemist and his researches
completely out of people's minds. During those two years Douai was so
often on the point of being taken, it was so constantly occupied either
by the French or by the enemy, so many foreigners came there, so many of
the country-people sought refuge within its walls, so many lives were
in peril, so many catastrophes occurred, that each man thought only of
himself.

The Abbe de Solis and his nephew, and the two Pierquins, doctor and
lawyer, were the only persons who now visited Madame Claes; for whom
the winter of 1814-1815 was a long and dreary death-scene. Her husband
rarely came to see her. It is true that after dinner he remained some
hours in the parlor, near her bed; but as she no longer had the strength
to keep up a conversation, he merely said a few words, invariably the
same, sat down, spoke no more, and a dreary silence settled down upon
the room. The monotony of this existence was broken only on the days
when the Abbe de Solis and his nephew passed the evening with Madame
Claes.

While the abbe played backgammon with Balthazar, Marguerite talked with
Emmanuel by the bedside of her mother, who smiled at their innocent joy,
not allowing them to see how painful and yet how soothing to her wounded
spirit were the fresh breezes of their virgin love, murmuring in fitful
words from heart to heart. The inflection of their voices, to them
so full of charm, to her was heart-breaking; a glance of mutual
understanding surprised between the two threw her, half-dead as she
was, back to the young and happy past which gave such bitterness to
the present. Emmanuel and Marguerite with intuitive delicacy of feeling
repressed the sweet half-childish play of love, lest it should hurt the
saddened woman whose wounds they instinctively divined.

No one has yet remarked that feelings have an existence of their own, a
nature which is developed by the circumstances that environ them, and in
which they are born; they bear a likeness to the places of their growth,
and keep the imprint of the ideas that influenced their development.
There are passions ardently conceived which remain ardent, like that of
Madame Claes for her husband: there are sentiments on which all life
has smiled; these retain their spring-time gaiety, their harvest-time
of joy, seasons that never fail of laughter or of fetes; but there are
other loves, framed in melancholy, circled by distress, whose pleasures
are painfu