Never before had Madame Chanteau appeared so busy. She was taking advantage, she said, of the confusion into which her husband's illness threw the household to go through her papers, make up her accounts, and clear off arrears of correspondence. So in the afternoons she shut herself up in her bedroom, leaving Louise to her own resources; and the girl immediately went upstairs to Lazare, for she detested being alone. They thus got into the way of being together, remaining undisturbed till dinner-time in the big room on the second floor, that room which had so long served Pauline both for study and amusement. The young man's little iron bedstead was still there, hidden away behind the screen. The piano was covered with dust, and the table buried beneath an accumulation of papers, books, and pamphlets. In the middle of it, between two piles of dry seaweed, was a little model of a stockade, cut out of deal with a knife, and recalling the grandfather's masterpiece, the bridge which, in its glass case, adorned the mantelpiece in the dining-room. For some time Lazare had been falling into a nervous condition. His workmen had irritated him, and he had just rid himself of the works on the shore as of a burden beyond his strength, without tasting the pleasure of seeing his work accomplished. Other plans now filled his head--vague projects for the future, appointments at Caen, operations which would bring him great fame. Yet he never took any definite active steps, but relapsed into a state of idleness which seemed to render him weaker, less courageous, every hour. The great shock which he had received from Pauline's illness added to mental disquietude a perpetual craving for the open air, a peculiar physical longing, as though he felt some imperious necessity of recouping himself after his struggle against pain and sorrow. The presence of Louise still further excited his feverishness. She did not seem able to speak to him without leaning upon his shoulder; she smiled close to his face, and her cat-like graces, the warmth that came from her person, and all the disturbing freedom of her manner quite turned his head. He was seized with a feeling against which his conscience struggled. With a friend of his childhood, in his mother's house, any idea of the sort, he told himself, was not to be thought of for a moment; and his sense of honour made his arms tingle with pain whenever he caught hold of Louise as they played together, and a thrill sent his blood surging through his veins. It was no thought of Pauline that kept him back. She would never have known anything about the matter. Amidst all his strange fancies he began to indulge in ferocious, pessimistic sallies respecting women and love. Every evil originated in women, who were, said he, foolish and fickle, and perpetuated grief by desire; while love was nothing but delusion, the onslaught of future generations which wished to come into existence.