Indeed, she heard no further confessions from him. "I was fascinated by her agitation," he noted that night in his diary in his elegant and pompous style; "I swore never again to disturb her peace of mind: am I not blessed enough without that?" He continued to come to town--he only slept at the villa Hashim--and he behaved erratically, but always more or less properly. At times he was, as before, unnaturally playful and naïve, running about with the children in the garden; but more often he sat with her and "sipped of her presence," read newspapers and novels to her, and "was happy in her listening to him." "The children were not in the way," he wrote of those days, "their voices, laughter, comings and goings, their very beings acted like the subtlest conductors for our feelings; thanks to them, the charm of those feelings was intensified; we talked about the most everyday matters, but something else sounded through what we said: our happiness; yes, yes, she, too, was happy--I maintain that! She loved me to read poetry; in the evenings from the balcony we looked down upon Constantine, lying at our feet in the bluish moonlight...." At last, in August Madame Maraud insisted that he should go away, return to his work; and during his journey he wrote: "I'm going away! I am going away, poisoned by the bitter sweet of parting! She gave me a remembrance, a velvet ribbon which she wore round her neck as a young girl. At the last moment she blessed me, and I saw tears shine in her eyes, when she said: 'Good-bye, my dear son.'" Was he right in thinking that Madam Maraud was also happy in August? No one knows. But that his leaving was painful to her--there is no doubt of that. That word "son," which had often troubled her before, now had a sound for her which she could not bear to hear. Formerly when friends met her on the way to church, and said to her jokingly: "What have you to pray for, Madame Maraud? You are already without sin and without troubles!" she more than once answered with a sad smile: "I complain to God that he has not given me a son." Now the thought of a son never left her, the thought of the happiness that he would constantly give her by his mere existence in the world. And once, soon after Emile's departure, she said to her husband: "Now I understand it all. I now believe firmly that every mother ought to have a son, that every mother who has no son, if she look into her own heart and examine her whole life, will realize that she is unhappy. You are a man and cannot feel that, but it is so.... Oh how tenderly, passionately a woman can love a son!" She was very affectionate to her husband during that autumn. It would happen sometimes that, sitting alone with him, she would suddenly say bashfully: "Listen, Hector.... I am ashamed to mention it again to you, but still ... do you ever think of March, '76? Ah, if we had had a son!"