George was not so corrupted but that his admiration for Ghéridanisol yielded at last to horror. When he reached home that evening, he flung himself into his mother’s arms; and Pauline had a burst of gratitude to God, who by means of this dreadful tragedy had brought her son back to her. XX EDOUARD’S JOURNAL WITHOUT exactly pretending to explain anything, I should not like to put forward any fact which was not accounted for by a sufficiency of motive. And for that reason I shall not make use of little Boris’s suicide for my _Counterfeiters_; I have too much difficulty in understanding it. And then, I dislike police court items. There is something peremptory, irrefutable, brutal, outrageously real about them.... I accept reality coming as a proof in support of my thought, but not as preceding it. It displeases me to be surprised. Boris’s suicide seems to me an _indecency_, for I was not expecting it. A little cowardice enters into every suicide, notwithstanding La Pérouse, who no doubt thinks his grandson was more courageous than he. If the child could have foreseen the disaster which his dreadful action has brought upon the Vedels, there would be no excuse for him. Azaïs has been obliged to break up the school--for the time being, he says; but Rachel is afraid of ruin. Four families have already removed their children. I have not been able to dissuade Pauline from taking George away, so that she may keep him at home with her; especially as the boy has been profoundly shaken by his schoolfellow’s death, and seems inclined to reform. What repercussions this calamity has had! Even Olivier is touched by it. Armand, notwithstanding his cynical airs, feels such anxiety at the ruin which is threatening his family, that he has offered to devote the time that Passavant leaves him, to working in the school, for old La Pérouse has become manifestly incapable of doing what is required of him. I dreaded seeing him again. It was in his little bedroom on the second floor of the pension, that he received me. He took me by the arm at once, and with a mysterious, almost a smiling air, which greatly surprised me, for I was expecting tears: “That noise,” he said, “you know ... the noise I told you about the other day....” “Well?” “It has stopped--finished. I don’t hear it any more, however much I listen.” As one humours a child, “I wager,” said I, “that now you regret it.” “Oh! no; no.... It’s such a rest. I am so much in need of silence. Do you know what I’ve been thinking? That in this life we can’t know what real silence is. Even our blood makes a kind of continual noise; we don’t notice it, because we have become accustomed to it ever since our childhood.... But I think there are things in life which we can’t succeed in hearing--harmonies ... because this noise drowns them. Yes, I think it’s only after our death that we shall really be able to hear.”