Ah, God!  Rose on that bed of mourning, white, cold, and dead!  She, the fairest, the gayest, the most loved!  She, before whom all the others were ever in admiration—­she of whom they were so proud, so fond!  And to think that this blow should fall in the midst of hope, bright hope in long life and sterling happiness, but ten days before her wedding, and on the morrow of that day of wild gayety, all jests and laughter!  They could again see her, full of life and so adorable with her happy youthful fancies—­that princely reception and that royal procession.  It had seemed as if those two coming weddings, celebrated the same day, would be like the supreme florescence of the family’s long happiness and prosperity.  Doubtless they had often experienced trouble and had even wept at times, but they had drawn closer together and consoled one another on such occasions; none had ever been cut off from the good-night embraces which healed every sore.  And now the best was gone, death had come to say that absolute joy existed for none, that the most valiant, the happiest; never reaped the fulness of their hopes.  There was no life without death.  And they paid their share of the debt of human wretchedness, paid it the more dearly since they had made for themselves a larger sum of life.  When everything germinates and grows around one, when one has determined on unreserved fruitfulness; on continuous creation and increase, how awful is the recall to the ever-present dim abyss in which the world is fashioned, on the day when misfortune falls, digs its first pit, and carries off a loved one!  It is like a sudden snapping, a rending of the hopes which seemed to be endless, and a feeling of stupefaction comes at the discovery that one cannot live and love forever!

Ah! how terrible were the two days that followed:  the farm itself lifeless, without sound save that of the breathing of the cattle, the whole family gathered together, overcome by the cruel spell of waiting, ever in tears while the poor corpse remained there under a harvest of flowers.  And there was this cruel aggravation, that on the eve of the funeral, when the body had been laid in the coffin, it was brought down into that gallery where they had lunched so merrily while discussing how magnificently they might decorate it for the two weddings.  It was there that the last funeral watch, the last wake, took place, and there were no evergreen shrubs, no garlands of foliage, merely four tapers which burnt there amid a wealth of white roses gathered in the morning, but already fading.  Neither the mother nor the father was willing to go to bed that night.  They remained, side by side, near the child whom mother-earth was taking back from them.  They could see her quite little again, but sixteen months old, at the time of their first sojourn at Chantebled in the old tumbledown shooting-box, when she had just been weaned and they were wont to go and cover her up at nighttime.  They saw her also, later on, in Paris, hastening to