Lazare was beginning to get a little tired. Children, even his own, quickly bored him. As he looked at his boy, so merry and now out of danger, the thought flashed through his mind that this little creature would outlive him and would doubtless close his eyes for the last time, an idea which made him shudder with agony. Since he had come to the determination to continue vegetating at Bonneville, he was constantly occupied with the thought that he would die in the room where his mother had died; and he never went up the stairs without telling himself that one day his coffin would pass that way. The entrance to the passage was very narrow, and there was an awkward turning, which was a perpetual source of disquietude to him, and he worried himself with wondering how the bearers would be able to carry him out without jolting him. As increasing age day by day shortened his span of life, that constant dwelling upon the thought of death hastened his breaking-up, annihilated his last shreds of manliness. He was 'quite done for,' as he often told himself; he was of no further use at all, and he would ask himself what was the good of bestirring himself, as he fell deeper and deeper into the slough of boredom. 'Just once more to grandfather!' cried Pauline. Chanteau was not able to stretch out his arms to receive and support his grandson, and, though he set his knees apart, the clutching of the child's puny fingers at his trousers drew sighs of pain from him. The little one was already used to the old man's ceaseless moaning, and probably imagined, in his scarcely awakened mind, that all grandfathers suffered in the same way. That day, however, in the bright sunshine, as he came and fell against him, he raised his little face, checked his laugh, and gazed at the old man with his vacillating eyes. The grandfather's deformed hands looked like hideous blocks of mingled flesh and chalk; his face, dented with red wrinkles, disfigured by suffering, seemed to have been violently twisted towards his right shoulder; while his whole body was covered with bumps and crevices, as if it were that of some old stone saint, damaged and badly pieced together. Paul appeared quite surprised to see him looking so ill and so old in the sunshine. 'Just once more! Just once more!' cried Pauline again. She, full of health and cheerfulness, kept sending the little lad to and fro between the two men, from the grandfather, who obstinately lived on in hopeless suffering, to the father, who was already undermined by terror of the hereafter. 'Perhaps his generation will be a less foolish one than this,' she suddenly exclaimed. 'He won't accuse chemistry of spoiling his life; he will believe that it is still possible to live, even with the certainty of having some day to die.' Lazare smiled in an embarrassed way. 'Bah!' he muttered, 'he will have the gout like my father, and his nerves will be worse strung than mine. Just see how weak he is! It is the law of degeneration.'