"It may already have been too late--be sure it was not the first time she had been guilty--my first thought was to give you information. But I had not the courage. Then I told Madame. I thought I saw plainly that I had nothing to tell she was not already aware of. Nevertheless she chided me almost harshly. 'You know very well,' she said, 'that my husband is always there when Mademoiselle prepares the medicines. So that he too would be guilty. Rather than believe that, I would accept death at his hands a hundred times over!' And I remember, Monsieur, how at the very moment when she told me that, you came out from the little boudoir, and brought her a glass of valerian. She cast on me a terrible look and drank. A few minutes afterwards she was so ill that she thought the end was come. She begged me to give her her crucifix, and made me swear never to utter a word concerning our suspicions. It was then I sent for the priest. I have told you, Monsieur, what I know; what I have seen with my own eyes. I swear that I have said nothing but what is absolutely true." She paused. I could not answer her. I seized her old wrinkled and trembling hands and pressed them to my forehead, and wept like a child. May 10.--She died believing me guilty! The thought is terrible to me. I know not what to do. A creature so frail, so delicate, so sweet. "Yes!" she said to herself, "my husband is a murderer; what he is giving me is poison, and he knows it." She died with that thought in her mind--her last thought. And she will never, never know that it was not so; that I am innocent; that the thought is torment to me: that I am the most unhappy of men. Ah! God, all-powerful! if you indeed exist, you see what I suffer. Have pity on me! Ah! how I wish I could believe that all is not over between [239] her and me; that she sees and hears me; that she knew the truth. But I find it impossible! impossible! June.--That I was a criminal was her last thought, and she will never be undeceived. All seems so completely ended when one dies. All returns to its first elements. How credit that miracle of a personal resurrection? and yet in truth all is mystery,--miracle, around us, about us, within ourselves. The entire universe is but a continuous miracle. Man's new birth from the womb of death--is it a mystery less comprehensible than his birth from the womb of his mother? Those lines are the last written by Bernard de Vaudricourt. His health, for some time past disturbed by grief, was powerless against the emotions of the last terrible trial imposed on him. A malady, the exact nature of which was not determined, in a few days assumed a mortal character. Perceiving that his end was come, he caused Monseigneur de Courteheuse to be summoned--he desired to die in the religion of Aliette. Living, the poor child had been defeated: she prevailed in her death.