. For
since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next
day, there has existed for me a mystery which I force from my thoughts,
but which constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I know
nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and I dread to learn. It
does not seem to me as if she were dead; I think of her simply as of a
person who has disappeared. My imagination returns to her last hours,
gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture
me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At
last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the
hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life
as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls
upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.

In a distant corner, I rang at a door with little white curtains. It was
opened and I found myself in a parlor where a Virgin stood upon a sort
of altar between two windows. On the northern wall of the room, the
cold, bare room, there are--why, I cannot explain--two framed views of
Vesuvius, wretched water-colors which seem to shiver and to be entirely
expatriated there. Through an open door behind me, from a small room in
which the sun shines brightly, I hear the chattering of sisters and
children, childish joys, pretty little bursts of laughter, all sorts of
fresh, clear vocal notes: a sound as from a dovecote bathed in the sun.
Sisters in white with black caps pass and repass; one stops in front of
my chair. She is short, badly developed, with an ugly, sweet face, a
poor face by the grace of God. She is the mother of the Salle
Saint-Joseph. She tells me how Rose died, in hardly any pain, feeling
that she was improving, almost well, overflowing with encouragement and
hope. In the morning, after her bed was made, without any suspicion that
death was near, suddenly she was taken with a hemorrhage, which lasted
some few seconds. I came away, much comforted, delivered from the
thought that she had had the anticipatory taste of death, the horror of
its approach.

_Thursday, October 21._

* * * * *

In the midst of our dinner, which was rendered melancholy enough by the
constant hovering of the conversation around the subject of death,
Maria, who came to dinner to-night, cried out, after two or three
nervous blows with her fingers upon her fluffy blonde locks:--"My