When we returned home, we must look through her papers, get her clothes together, sort out the clutter of phials, bandages and innumerable things that sickness collects--jostle death about, in short. It was a ghastly thing to enter that attic, where the crumbs of bread from her last meal were still lying in the folds of the bedclothes. I threw the coverlid up over the bolster, like a sheet over the ghost of a dead man. _Monday, August 18._--The chapel is beside the amphitheatre. In the hospital God and the dead body are neighbors. At the mass said for the poor woman beside her coffin, two or three others were placed near by to reap the benefit of the service. There was an unpleasant promiscuousness of salvation in that performance: it resembled the common grave in the prayer. Behind me, in the chapel, Rose's niece was weeping--the little girl she had at our house for a short time, who is now a young woman of nineteen, a pupil at the convent of the Sisters of Saint-Laurent: a poor, weazened, pale, stunted creature, rickety from starvation, with a head too heavy for her body, back bent double, and the air of a Mayeux--the last sad remnant of that consumption-ridden family, awaited by Death and with his hand even now heavy upon her,--in her soft eyes there is already a gleam of the life beyond. Then from the chapel to the extreme end of the Montmartre cemetery,--vast as a necropolis and occupying a whole quarter of the city,--walking at slow steps through mud that never ends. Lastly the intoning of the priests, and the coffin laboriously lowered by the gravediggers' arms to the ends of the ropes, as a cask of wine is lowered into a cellar. _Wednesday, August 20._--Once more I must return to the hospital. For since the visit I paid Rose on Thursday and her sudden death the next day, there has existed for me a mystery which I force from my thoughts, but which constantly returns; the mystery of that agony of which I know nothing, of that sudden end. I long to know and I dread to learn. It does not seem to me as if she were dead; I think of her simply as of a person who has disappeared. My imagination returns to her last hours, gropes for them in the darkness and reconstructs them, and they torture me with their veiled horrors! I need to have my doubts resolved. At last, this morning, I took my courage in both hands. Again I see the hospital, again I see the red-faced, obese concierge, reeking with life as one reeks with wine, and the corridors where the morning light falls upon the pale faces of smiling convalescents.