ct that he must be sincere when he
declared he worked for the glory and prosperity of his family. His love
for his wife and family was not only vast, it was infinite. That feeling
could not be extinct; it was magnified, and reproduced in another form.

Noble, generous, timid as she was, she prepared herself to ring into the
ears of this noble man the word and the sound of money, to show him the
sores of poverty, and force him to hear cries of distress when he was
listening only for the melodious voice of Fame. Perhaps his love for her
would lessen! If she had had no children, she would bravely and joyously
have welcomed the new destiny her husband was making for her. Women who
are brought up in opulence are quick to feel the emptiness of material
enjoyments; and when their hearts, more wearied than withered, have once
learned the happiness of a constant interchange of real feelings, they
feel no shrinking from reduced outward circumstances, provided they
are still acceptable to the man who has loved them. Their wishes, their
pleasures, are subordinated to the caprices of that other life outside
of their own; to them the only dreadful future is to lose him.

At this moment, therefore, her children came between Pepita and her true
life, just as Science had come between herself and Balthazar. And thus,
when she reached home after vespers, and threw herself into the deep
armchair before the window of the parlor, she sent away her children,
directing them to keep perfectly quiet, and despatched a message to her
husband, through Lemulquinier, saying that she wished to see him.
But although the old valet did his best to make his master leave the
laboratory, Balthazar scarcely heeded him. Madame Claes thus gained time
for reflection. She sat thinking, paying no attention to the hour nor
the light. The thought of owing thirty thousand francs that could not be
paid renewed her past anguish and joined it to that of the present
and the future. This influx of painful interests, ideas, and feelings
overcame her, and she wept.

As Balthazar entered at last through the panelled door, the expression
of his face seemed to her more dreadful, more absorbed, more distracted
than she had yet seen it. When he made her no answer she was magnetized
for a moment by the fixity of that blank look emptied of all expression,
by the consuming ideas that issued as if distilled from that bald brow.
Under the shock of this impression she wished to die.