The doctor went upstairs.  The room had not been disturbed.  Only a window had been opened.  There the withered flowers, stifled by their own perfumes, exhaled but the faint odour of dead beauty.  Within the alcove, however, there still hung an asphyxiating warmth, which seemed to trickle into the room and gradually disperse in tiny puffs.  Albine, snowy-pale, with her hands upon her heart and a smile playing over her face, lay sleeping on her couch of hyacinths and tuberoses.  And she was quite happy, since she was quite dead.  Standing by the bedside, the doctor gazed at her for a long time, with a keen expression such as comes into the eyes of scientists who attempt to work resurrections.  But he did not even disturb her clasped hands.  He kissed her brow, on the spot where her latent maternity had already set a slight shadow.  Below, in the garden, Jeanbernat was still driving his spade into the ground in heavy, regular fashion.

A quarter of an hour later, however, the old man came upstairs.  He had completed his work.  He found the doctor seated by the bedside, buried in such a deep reverie that he did not seem conscious of the heavy tears that were trickling down his cheeks.

The two men only glanced at each other.  Then, after an interval of silence, Jeanbernat slowly said: 

’Well, was I not right?  There is nothing, nothing, nothing.  It is all mere nonsense.’

He remained standing and began to pick up the roses that had fallen from the bed, throwing them, one by one, upon Albine’s skirts.

‘The flowers,’ he said, ’live only for a day, while the rough nettles, like me, wear out the very stones amidst which they spring. . . .  Now it’s all over; I can kick the bucket; I am nearly distracted.  My last ray of sunlight has been snuffed out.  It’s all nonsense, as I said before.’

He threw himself upon one of the chairs in his turn.  He did not shed a tear; he bore himself with rigid despair, like some automaton whose mechanism is broken.  Mechanically he reached out his hand and took a book that lay on the little table strewn with violets.  It was one of the books stored away in the loft, an odd volume of Holbach,* which he had been reading since the morning, while watching by Albine’s body.  As the doctor still remained silent, buried in distressful thought, he began to turn its pages over.  But a sadden idea occurred to him.

  * Doubtless Holbach’s now forgotten Catechism of Nature, into
    which M. Zola himself may well have peeped whilst writing this
    story.—­ED.

‘If you will help me,’ he said to the doctor, ’we will carry her downstairs, and bury her with all her flowers.’

Uncle Pascal shuddered.  Then he explained to the old man that it was not allowed for one to keep the dead in that fashion.

‘What! it isn’t allowed!’ cried Jeanbernat.  ’Well, then, I will allow it myself!  Doesn’t she belong to me?  Isn’t she mine?  Do you think I am going to let the priests walk off with her?  Let them try, if they want to get a shot from my gun!’