. Balthazar had replied, once for all, that he was
working for the fame and the fortune of his family.

Thus, to the tortures of the heart which Madame Claes had borne for two
years--one following the other with cumulative suffering--was now added
a dreadful and ceaseless fear which made the future terrifying. Women
have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous. Why do they fear
so much more than they hope in matters that concern the interests of
this life? Why is their faith given only to religious ideas of a future
existence? Why do they so ably foresee the catastrophes of fortune and
the crises of fate? Perhaps the sentiment which unites them to the
men they love gives them a sense by which they weigh force, measure
faculties, understand tastes, passions, vices, virtues. The perpetual
study of these causes in the midst of which they live gives them, no
doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing effects in all possible relations
of earthly life. What they see of the present enables them to judge
of the future with an intuitive ability explained by the perfection
of their nervous system, which allows them to seize the lightest
indications of thought and feeling. Their whole being vibrates in
communion with great moral convulsions. Either they feel, or they see.

Now, although separated from her husband for over two years, Madame
Claes foresaw the loss of their property. She fully understood the
deliberate ardor, the well-considered, inalterable steadfastness of
Balthazar; if it were indeed true that he was seeking to make gold, he
was capable of throwing his last crust into the crucible with absolute
indifference. But what was he really seeking? Up to this time maternal
feeling and conjugal love had been so mingled in the heart of this woman
that the children, equally beloved by husband and wife, had never come
between them. Suddenly she found herself at times more mother than wife,
though hitherto she had been more wife than mother. However ready she
had been to sacrifice her fortune and even her children to the man who
had chosen her, loved her, adored her, and to whom she was still the
only woman in the world, the remorse she felt for the weakness of her
maternal love threw her into terrible alternations of feeling. As a
wife, she suffered in heart; as a mother, through her children; as a
Christian, for all.

She kept silence, and hid the cruel struggle in her soul. Her husband,
sole arbiter of the family fate,