She had plenty of time now to brood over her wrongs, and to concoct schemes of vengeance. Her father no longer required her care. He had passed from the frenzied ravings of insanity and delirium to the stupor of idiocy. The physician declared his patient cured. Cured! The body was cured, perhaps, but reason had succumbed. All traces of intelligence had disappeared from this once mobile face, so ready to assume any expression which the most consummate hypocrisy required. There was no longer a sparkle in the eye which had formerly gleamed with cunning, and the lower lip hung with a terrible expression of stupidity. And there was no hope of any improvement. A single passion, the table, took the place of all the passions which had formerly swayed the life of this ambitious man. The marquis, who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory--he had lost all these. 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 the marquis roamed about the large gardens, his daughter regarded him from her window with a strange terror in her heart. But 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 is far more terrible than it would have been had his bullet pierced my father’s heart. It is a revenge like this that I desire. It is due me; I will have it!” She saw Chupin every two or three days; sometimes going to the place of meeting alone, sometimes accompanied by Aunt Medea. The old poacher came punctually, although he was beginning to tire of his task. “I am risking a great deal,” he growled. “I supposed that Jean Lacheneur would go and live at the Borderie with his sister. Then, I should be safe. But no; the brigand continues to prowl around with his gun under his arm, and to sleep in the woods at night. What game is he hunting? Father Chupin, of course. On the other hand, I know that my rascally innkeeper over there has abandoned his inn and mysteriously disappeared. Where is he? Hidden behind one of these trees, perhaps, deciding in which portion of my body he shall plunge his knife.” What irritated the old poacher most of all was, that after two months of surveillance, he had arrived at the conclusion that, whatever might have been the relations existing between Martial and Marie-Anne in the past, all was now over between them. But Blanche would not admit this. “Say that they are more cunning than you, Father Chupin.”