For an instant she remained panting. Then with a shudder, which made her teeth chatter, she stammered a single phrase: “The _gendarme_! the _gendarme_!” Pascal and Félicité and Clotilde understood. They looked at one another involuntarily, turning very pale. The whole dreadful history of the old mother—of the mother of them all—rose before them, the ardent love of her youth, the long suffering of her mature age. Already two moral shocks had shaken her terribly—the first, when she was in her ardent prime, when a _gendarme_ shot down her lover Macquart, the smuggler, like a dog; the second, years ago, when another _gendarme_ shattered with a pistol shot the skull of her grandson Silvère, the insurgent, the victim of the hatred and the sanguinary strife of the family. Blood had always bespattered her. And a third moral shock finished her; blood bespattered her again, the impoverished blood of her race, which she had just beheld flowing slowly, and which lay upon the ground, while the fair royal child, his veins and his heart empty, slept. Three times—face to face with her past life, her life red with passion and suffering, haunted by the image of expiation—she stammered: “The _gendarme_! the _gendarme_! the _gendarme_!” Then she sank back into her armchair. They thought she was dead, killed by the shock. But the keeper at this moment at last appeared, endeavoring to excuse herself, fearing that she would be dismissed. When, aided by her, Dr. Pascal had placed Aunt Dide on the bed, he found that the old mother was still alive. She was not to die until the following day, at the age of one hundred and five years, three months, and seven days, of congestion of the brain, caused by the last shock she had received. Pascal, turning to his mother, said: “She will not live twenty-four hours; to-morrow she will be dead. Ah! Uncle Macquart, then she, and this poor boy, one after another. How much misery and grief!” He paused and added in a lower tone: “The family is thinning out; the old trees fall and the young die standing.” Félicité must have thought this another allusion. She was sincerely shocked by the tragic death of little Charles. But, notwithstanding, above the horror which she felt there arose a sense of immense relief. Next week, when they should have ceased to weep, what a rest to be able to say to herself that all this abomination of the Tulettes was at an end, that the family might at last rise, and shine in history! Then she remembered that she had not answered the involuntary accusation made against her by her son at the notary’s; and she spoke again of Macquart, through bravado: “You see now that servants are of no use. There was one here, and yet she prevented nothing; it would have been useless for Uncle Macquart to have had one to take care of him; he would be in ashes now, all the same.” She sighed, and then continued in a broken voice: