And then all that she had beheld, all that she had heard during the last few weeks poured forth from Madame Caroline's wounded heart--found vent in a cry of execration for Saccard. She could no longer keep silent, no longer put him aside as if he did not exist, so as to avoid judging and condemning him. He alone was guilty; it was shown by each of these accumulated disasters, the frightful pile of which terrified her. She cursed him; her wrath and her indignation, so long repressed, overflowed in a revengeful hatred, the hatred of evil itself. Did she no longer love her brother, then, that she had waited until now to hate the terrible man who was the sole cause of their misfortune? Her poor brother, that great innocent, that great toiler, so just and so honest, now soiled with the indelible stain of imprisonment, the victim whom she had forgotten, though he was dearer than all the others! Ah, that Saccard might find no pardon! that no one might dare to plead his cause any further, not even those who continued to believe in him, not even those who had only known his kindness!--that he might some day die alone, spurned and despised! Madame Caroline raised her eyes. She had reached the Place de la Bourse, and saw the Temple of Money in front of her. The twilight was falling. Behind the building a ruddy cloud hung in the fog-laden wintry sky--a cloud like the smoke of a conflagration, charged with the flames and the dust of a stormed city. And against this cloud the Bourse stood out grey and gloomy in the melancholiness born of the catastrophe which, for a month past, had left it deserted, open to the four winds of heaven, like some market which famine has emptied. Once again had the inevitable, periodical epidemic come--the epidemic which sweeps through it every ten or fifteen years--the Black Fridays, as the speculators say, which strew the soil with ruins. Years are needed for confidence to be restored, for the great financial houses to be built up anew, and time goes slowly by until the passion for gambling, gradually reviving, flames up once more and repeats the adventure, when there comes another crisis, and the downfall of everything in a fresh disaster. This time, however, beyond the ruddy smoke on the horizon, in the hidden distant parts of the city, it seemed as though one could hear a vague sound of splitting and rending, betokening the end of a world--the world of the Second Empire. CHAPTER XII FROM HORROR TO HOPE