She read the words and figures over again. Death: she had always had a terror of death. The essential thing was not to contemplate death,--only to think of the necessary preliminaries: pour out the water, dissolve the powder, drink it off, lie down on a bed, and close her eyes: she must not look further than that. Why be more afraid of the sleep that was death, than of any other sleep? If she was shivering, it was only because the early morning air was chilly. She went downstairs again, and stopped at the door of the room in which Marie slept. The nurse’s snores were like the grunts of an animal. Thérèse pushed the door back: the growing daylight filtered through the shutters, and the narrow iron bed gleamed white in the darkness. Two tiny fists were lying on the sheet: a baby profile was buried in the pillow. Thérèse recognised that ear; it was a little too large,--just like her own. They were right, a replica of herself lay there, sunk in slumber. “I shall go away,--but that part of me remains; a fate that must be fulfilled to the end, and not one iota omitted.” All manner of dumb desires and blind inclinations, laws of the blood that none may escape,--in these she must survive. Thérèse had read of desperate people carrying off their children to death with them: worthy citizens let their paper fall, exclaiming “How can such things be possible?” Because she was a criminal, Thérèse knew too well that they were possible, and that for very little.... She knelt down, and laid her lips against a little outstretched hand; she was amazed at something that surged up from her inmost being, rose up to her eyes, and burned her cheeks: a few poor tears,--she who never wept! Thérèse got up, looked at the child once more, then went into her own room, filled a glass with water, broke the wax seal, and hesitated between the three packets of poison. The window was open. The crowing of the cocks seemed to cleave the mist, which still clung to the pines in transparent strips. The land lay bathed in the dawn. How could she say farewell to so much light? What was death? No one knew what it was. Thérèse was not quite certain that it meant annihilation: she was not sure that there was no one there. She loathed herself for feeling such terrors; she who did not hesitate to hurl a fellow-creature into nothingness, was scared of it herself. How her cowardice humiliated her! If that Being existed (and in one brief instant she saw before her that dreadful Corpus Christi procession, that solitary figure weighed down under his golden cape, the thing that he carried in both hands, and his look of dejection); since He exists, let Him turn aside the murderous hand before it is too late; and if it is His will that a poor blind soul should pass that bourne, let Him give a loving welcome to the criminal whom He created.