In these remarks Chupin did Blanche great injustice. If, as he had noted, she had shrunk back shuddering when he urged her to decide, it was not because her will wavered, but rather because her flesh instinctively revolted against the deed she had in her mind. The old spy’s unwelcome touch, his perfidious voice and threatening glance, may also in a minor degree have prompted this movement of repulsion. At all events, Blanche’s reflections were by no means calculated to appease her rancour. Whatever Chupin and the Sairmeuse villagers might say to the contrary, she regarded the story which Marie-Anne, in obedience to the Abbe Midon’s instructions, had told of her travels in Piedmont as a ridiculous fable, and nothing more. In her opinion, Marie-Anne had simply emerged from some retreat where Martial had previously deemed it prudent to conceal her. But why this sudden re-appearance? Vindictive Blanche was ready to swear that it was out of mere bravado, and intended only as an insult to herself. “Ah, I _will_ have my revenge,” she thought. “I would tear my heart out if it were capable of cowardly weakness under such provocation!” The voice of conscience was unheard, unheeded, in this tumult of passion. Her sufferings, and Jean Lacheneur’s attempt upon her father’s life, seemed to justify the most terrible reprisals. She had plenty of time now to brood over her wrongs, and to concoct schemes of vengeance; for her father no longer required her care. He had passed from the frenzied ravings of delirium to the stupor of idiocy. And yet the physician had confidently declared his patient to be cured. Cured! The body was cured, perhaps, but reason had utterly fled. All traces of intelligence had left the marquis’s once mobile face, so ready in former times to assume the precise expression which his hypocrisy and duplicity required. His eyes, which had gleamed with cunning, wore a dull, vacant stare, and his under lip hung low, as is customary with idiots. Worst of all, no hope of any improvement was to be entertained. A single passion--indulgence at table--had taken the place of all those which in former times had swayed the life of this ambitious man. The marquis, in previous years most temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with disgusting voracity, and was rapidly becoming extremely corpulent. Between his meals he would wander about the Chateau and its surrounding in a listless fashion, scarcely knowing what he did. His memory had gone, and he had lost all sense of dignity, all knowledge of good and evil. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched like a child. Often, as he roamed about the grounds, his daughter would gaze at him from her window with a strange terror in her heart. But after all, this warning of providence only increased her desire for revenge. “Who would not prefer death to such a misfortune?” she murmured. “Ah! Jean Lacheneur’s revenge