Ah! how great was the anguish, the torture in the cab, when Blaise brought Mathieu and Marianne back with him.  He had at first spoken to them simply of an accident, a rather serious fall.  But as the vehicle rolled along he had lost his self-possession, weeping and confessing the truth in response to their despairing questions.  Thus, when they at last reached the factory, they doubted no longer, their child was dead.  Work had just been stopped, and they recalled their visit to the place on the morrow of Maurice’s death.  They were returning to the same stillness, the same grave-like silence.  All the rumbling life had suddenly ceased, the machines were cold and mute, the workshops darkened and deserted.  Not a sound remained, not a soul, not a puff of that steam which was like the very breath of the place.  He who had watched over its work was dead, and it was dead like him.  Then their affright increased when they passed from the factory to the house amid that absolute solitude, the gallery steeped in slumber, the staircase quivering, all the doors upstairs open, as in some uninhabited place long since deserted.  In the ante-room they found no servant.  And it was indeed in the same tragedy of sudden death that they again participated, only this time it was their own son whom they were to find in the same room, on the same bed, frigid, pale, and lifeless.

Blaise had just expired.  Boutan was there at the head of the bed, holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was dying away.  And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively crossed the disorderly drawing-room, rushing into that bedchamber whose odor of nihility they recognized, he could but murmur in a voice full of sobs: 

“My poor friends, embrace him; you will yet have a little of his last breath.”

That breath had scarce ceased, and the unhappy mother, the unhappy father, had already sprung forward, kissing those lips that exhaled the final quiver of life, and sobbing and crying their distress aloud.  Their Blaise was dead.  Like Rose, he had died suddenly, a year later, on a day of festivity.  Their heart wound, scarce closed as yet, opened afresh with a tragic rending.  Amid their long felicity this was the second time that they were thus terribly recalled to human wretchedness; this was the second hatchet stroke which fell on the flourishing, healthy, happy family.  And their fright increased.  Had they not yet finished paying their accumulated debt to misfortune?  Was slow destruction now arriving with blow following blow?  Already since Rose had quitted them, her bier strewn with flowers, they had feared to see their prosperity and fruitfulness checked and interrupted now that there was an open breach.  And to-day, through that bloody breach, their Blaise departed in the most frightful of fashions, crushed as it were by the jealous anger of destiny.  And now what other of their children would be torn away from them on the morrow to pay in turn the ransom of their happiness?