nse of knowing nothing of a science which absorbed
her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty of a rival
might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman gives to her who
loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a mortification
like this only proved Madame Claes's powerlessness and humiliated the
feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she had reached a
point where her ignorance parted her from her husband. Worse than all,
last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he was often in
danger--near her, yet far away, and she might not share, nor even know,
his peril. Her position became, like hell, a moral prison from which
there was no issue, in which there was no hope. Madame Claes resolved
to know at least the outward attractions of this fatal science, and
she began secretly to study chemistry in the books. From this time the
family became, as it were, cloistered.

Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon
the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which
we find it at the moment when this history begins.

The situation grew daily more complicated. Like all passionate
women, Madame Claes was disinterested. Those who truly love know that
considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are
reluctantly associated with them. Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear
without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand
francs upon his property. The apparent authenticity of the transaction,
the rumors and conjectures spread through the town, forced Madame
Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband's notary and,
disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret anxieties or let him
guess them, and even ask her the humiliating question,--

"How is it that Monsieur Claes has not told you of this?"

Happily, the notary was almost a relation,--in this wise: The
grandfather of Monsieur Claes had married a Pierquin of Antwerp, of the
same family as the Pierquins of Douai. Since the marriage the latter,
though strangers to the Claes, claimed them as cousins. Monsieur
Pierquin, a young man twenty-six years of age, who had just succeeded
to his father's practice, was the only person who now had access to the
House of Claes.

Madame Balthazar had lived for several months in such complete solitude
that the notary was obliged not only to confirm the rumor of the
disasters, but to give her furt