om an upper
room the disquieting box, placed it on a table near the fire, beside his
lamp, and sat down to reflect again. In the face of these papers, almost
sacred, almost prohibited, which he would touch and which death alone
could have placed in his hands, he had in this moment the consciousness,
in a more heartbreaking manner, of the irrevocable departure of his
mother; tears returned to him and he wept there, alone, in the silence--

At last he opened the box--

His arteries beat heavily. Under the surrounding trees, in the obscure
solitude, he felt that forms were moving, to look at him through the
window-panes. He felt breaths strange to his own chest, as if some one
was breathing behind him. Shades assembled, interested in what he was
about to do.--The house was crowded with phantoms--

They were letters, preserved there for more than twenty years, all in
the same handwriting,--one of those handwritings, at once negligent and
easy, which men of the world have and which, in the eyes of the simple
minded, are an indication of great social difference. And at first,
a vague dream of protection, of elevation and of wealth diverted the
course of his thoughts.--He had no doubt about the hand which had
written them, those letters, and he held them tremblingly, not daring to
read them, nor even to look at the name with which they were signed.

One only had retained its envelope; then he read the address: "To Madame
Franchita Duval."--Oh! yes, he remembered having heard that his mother,
at the time of her disappearance from the Basque country, had taken
that name for a while.--Following this, was an indication of street and
number, which it pained him to read without his being able to understand
why, which made the blood come to his cheeks; then the name of that
large city, wherein he was born.--With fixed eyes, he stayed there,
looking no longer.--And suddenly, he had the horrible vision of that
clandestine establishment: in a suburban apartment, his mother, young,
elegant, mistress of some rich idler, or of some officer perhaps!--In
the regiment he had known some of these establishments, which doubtless
are all alike, and he had found in them for himself unexpected
adventures.--A dizziness seized him, to catch a glimpse thus under a new
aspect of the one whom he had venerated so much; the dear past faltered
behind him, as if to fall into a desolating abyss. And his despair
turned into a sudden execration for the one