The Priory soon grew silent. On the gravel of its alleys one no longer heard the trundle of carts and carriages bringing friends of the neighborhood to the front entrance decorated with geraniums. The front gate was bolted in order to make the carnages go through the back yard. In the kitchen the servants talked among themselves in low voices, moving about on tiptoe as is done in a house where some one has died. The gardener, by order of my mother who could not stand the noise of wheelbarrows and the scraping of rakes on the ground, allowed the wild stock to suck up the sap of the rose bushes turned yellow, allowed the weeds to choke the flowers in the baskets and to cover up the walks. And the house with its dark curtain of fir trees resembling a funeral canopy which sheltered it from the west, with its windows always closed, with its living corpse which it guarded buried behind its square walls of old brick looked like a burial vault. The country folk who on Sunday used to take a stroll in the woods, no longer passed by the Priory without some sort of superstitious terror, as if that dwelling were an evil place haunted by ghosts. Pretty soon a legend grew about the place: a wood cutter told how one night, going back from work, he saw Madame Mintié all in white, her hair disheveled, crossing the sky high above and beating her chest with the crucifix. My father locked himself up in his study more than ever, avoiding as much as possible staying in the house where he was hardly seen at times other than meal hours. He also took to making distant trips, increased the number of committees and societies over which he presided, found means to create for himself new distractions and business affairs far away from home. The Council General, the Agricultural Commission, the jury of the Court of Assizes were of great help to him for that purpose. When some one spoke to him of his wife he answered, shaking his head: "Ah, I am very uneasy, very much wrought up over it. How will it end? I must confess I fear she may become insane...." And when some one expressed his unbelief: "No, no, I am not joking.... You know well that it runs in her family, their heads don't seem to be very strong!" Nevertheless reproach never came from his lips, although he realized the embarrassing condition in which this situation placed his business affairs and which he ascribed to nothing but the irritating obduracy of my mother in not wanting to try anything that might cure her.