And now Claude learned to know Christine.  With his everlasting mistrust of woman a suspicion had remained to him, the suspicion of some love adventure in the provinces; but the girl’s soft eyes and bright laughter had carried all before them; he felt that she was as innocent as a big child.  As soon as she arrived, quite unembarrassed, feeling fully at her ease, as with a friend, she began to indulge in a ceaseless flow of chatter.  She had told him a score of times about her childhood at Clermont, and she constantly reverted to it.  On the evening that her father, Captain Hallegrain, had suddenly died, she and her mother had been to church.  She perfectly remembered their return home and the horrible night that had followed; the captain, very stout and muscular, lying stretched on a mattress, with his lower jaw protruding to such a degree that in her girlish memory she could not picture him otherwise.  She also had that same jaw, and when her mother had not known how to master her, she had often cried:  ’Ah, my girl, you’ll eat your heart’s blood out like your father.’  Poor mother! how she, Christine, had worried her with her love of horseplay, with her mad turbulent fits.  As far back as she could remember, she pictured her mother ever seated at the same window, quietly painting fans, a slim little woman with very soft eyes, the only thing she had inherited of her.  When people wanted to please her mother they told her, ‘she has got your eyes.’  And then she smiled, happy in the thought of having contributed at least that touch of sweetness to her daughter’s features.  After the death of her husband, she had worked so late as to endanger her eyesight.  But how else could she have lived?  Her widow’s pension—­five hundred francs per annum —­barely sufficed for the needs of her child.  For five years Christine had seen her mother grow thinner and paler, wasting away a little bit each day until she became a mere shadow.  And now she felt remorseful at not having been more obedient, at having driven her mother to despair by lack of application.  She had begun each week with magnificent intentions, promising that she would soon help her to earn money; but her arms and legs got the fidgets, in spite of her efforts; the moment she became quiet she fell ill.  Then one morning her mother had been unable to get up, and had died; her voice too weak to make itself heard, her eyes full of big tears.  Ever did Christine behold her thus dead, with her weeping eyes wide open and fixed on her.

At other times, Christine, when questioned by Claude about Clermont, forgot those sorrows to recall more cheerful memories.  She laughed gaily at the idea of their encampment, as she called it, in the Rue de l’Eclache; she born in Strasburg, her father a Gascon, her mother a Parisian, and all three thrown into that nook of Auvergne, which they detested.  The Rue de l’Eclache, sloping down to the Botanical Gardens, was narrow and dank, gloomy, like a vault.