This is because we have the cowardice of our vices. It is because we would be terrified to have beside us a living remembrance and remorse. It pleases us to live honored, and when we blush at the call of some wretched creature, we deny her to explain our blushes by her impudence. And we do this without deeming ourselves culpable, without asking ourselves what justice this creature demands. Custom has made us consider her a disgrace, and we are astonished that this disgrace speaks and calls itself a woman. My friends, I trembled before the truth. I understood and I wept. The question seemed to me simple, clear and self-evident. Laurence's words had frightened without disgusting me. I had not dreamed of her coming; but she came and I received her. I cannot, brothers, explain to you what were my feelings. My mind of twenty years had accepted in their absolute sense those words which admitted of no hesitation: "You are mine and I am yours!" The next morning, when I awoke and found Laurence in my room, I felt my heart ready to burst with anguish. The scene of the past night was effaced. I no longer heard the true and rude words which had made me receive the girl. The brutal fact alone remained. I looked at her as she slept. I saw her for the first time by daylight, without her face having the strange beauty of suffering or despair. When she thus appeared to me, ugly and prematurely old, plunged into a heavy, brutish slumber, I trembled before that faded and common countenance which I did not recognize. I could not comprehend how it was that I had awakened in such company. I seemed as if I had come out of a dream, and the reality proved so horrible that I had forgotten what had made me accept it. But what difference did it make whether it was pity, justice or mercy. The girl was there. Ah! brothers, can I shed enough tears, and will you have sufficient courage to dry them! CHAPTER VIII A MISSION FROM ON HIGH Yes, I think as you do; I wish still to hope, I wish to make this fatal union a source of noble aspirations. Formerly, when our thoughts drifted towards such unfortunate creatures as Laurence, we felt only mercy and pity for them. We discerned the holy task of redemption. We asked God to send us a dead soul, that we might, by kindly and gentle ways, restore it to youth and purity. The faith of our sixteenth year, we thought, ought to make sinners believe and bow the head. Then, we were Didier, pardoning Marion and acknowledging her as a wife at the foot of the scaffold. We lifted the sinner to the height of our tenderness.