'But, thank goodness, Monsieur Lazare isn't the kind to fall in love with a bag of bones. He has been in Paris, and knows what's what. He has too much good taste. Look! he has set her on the ground again just as if he were throwing a match away!' Then Véronique, in fear of letting her tongue slip again, began to flourish her feather brush once more; while Pauline, buried in deep thought, watched till evening Louise's pink gown and Lazare's white jacket both gleaming in the distance amidst the dark forms of the workmen. When she was beginning to feel fairly well again, Chanteau was seized with another violent attack of the gout; and this induced the young girl to come downstairs at once. The first time that she left her room it was to go and sit by the sick man's bedside. As Madame Chanteau said, very bitterly, the house was becoming quite a hospital. For some time her husband had not left his chair. After repeated seizures his whole body was now attacked by his foe; the disease mounted from his feet to his knees, and then to his elbows and hands. The little white pearl on his ear had fallen away, but others, of larger size, had appeared. All his joints became swollen, and spots of chalky tophus showed whitely, like lobster's eyes, through his skin in all parts. It was from chronic gout that he now suffered, chronic and incurable; the kind of gout which stiffens and deforms the body. 'Good heavens! what agony I'm in!' Chanteau kept repeating. 'My left knee is as stiff as a log; I can't move either my foot or my knee; and my elbow burns as though it were on fire. Just look at it!' Pauline looked, and observed an inflamed swelling on his left elbow. He complained bitterly of the agony he was suffering there; indeed, it very soon became unendurable. He kept his arm stiffly stretched, as he sighed and groaned, with his eyes constantly fixed upon his hand, which was a pitiable sight, with all the finger-joints knotted and swollen, and the thumb warped as though it had been beaten with a hammer. 'I cannot keep like this. You must come and help me to move. I thought just now that I had got myself fairly comfortable, but I am as bad again as ever I was. It is just as though my bones were being scraped with a saw. Try to raise me a little.' Twenty times in an hour did he have to be helped to change his position. He was in a continual state of anxious restlessness, always hoping to find relief in some new change. But Pauline still felt too weak to venture to move him without assistance. 'Véronique,' she would say softly, 'take hold of him very gently and help me to move him.' 'No, no! not Véronique!' Chanteau would cry out, 'she shakes me so!'