Oh! no, she will not try it again.  Monsieur le Commissaire need have no fear.  In the first place how could she go as far as the river, now that she can not stir from her bed?  If Monsieur le Commissaire could see her now, he would not doubt her word.  Doubtless the wish, the longing for death, so unmistakably written on her pale face the other morning, are still visible there; but they are softened, resigned.  The woman Delobelle knows that by waiting a little, yes, a very little time, she will have nothing more to wish for.

The doctors declare that she is dying of pneumonia; she must have contracted it in her wet clothes.  The doctors are mistaken; it is not pneumonia.  Is it her love, then, that is killing her?  No.  Since that terrible night she no longer thinks of Frantz, she no longer feels that she is worthy to love or to be loved.  Thenceforth there is a stain upon her spotless life, and it is of the shame of that and of nothing else that she is dying.

Mamma Delobelle sits by Desiree’s bed, working by the light from the window, and nursing her daughter.  From time to time she raises her eyes to contemplate that mute despair, that mysterious disease, then hastily resumes her work; for it is one of the hardest trials of the poor that they can not suffer at their ease.

Mamma Delobelle had to work alone now, and her fingers had not the marvellous dexterity of Desiree’s little hands; medicines were dear, and she would not for anything in the world have interfered with one of “the father’s” cherished habits.  And so, at whatever hour the invalid opened her eyes, she would see her mother, in the pale light of early morning, or under her night lamp, working, working without rest.

Between two stitches the mother would look up at her child, whose face grew paler and paler: 

“How do you feel?”

“Very well,” the sick girl would reply, with a faint, heartbroken smile, which illumined her sorrowful face and showed all the ravages that had been wrought upon it, as a sunbeam, stealing into a poor man’s lodging, instead of brightening it, brings out more clearly its cheerlessness and nudity.

The illustrious Delobelle was never there.  He had not changed in any respect the habits of a strolling player out of an engagement.  And yet he knew that his daughter was dying:  the doctor had told him so.  Moreover, it had been a terrible blow to him, for, at heart, he loved his child dearly; but in that singular nature the most sincere and the most genuine feelings adopted a false and unnatural mode of expression, by the same law which ordains that, when a shelf is placed awry, nothing that you place upon it seems to stand straight.