“And when for some idea, some misunderstanding, I feel that my love may be lessened, something within me bursts asunder, and I cry like a child with a broken toy. “I know it is puerile, but it is true, although I do my best to cure myself. Like a true Christian, you have punished me by returning good for evil. “Your notes are capital, and I think I shall be able to use them, though never did I feel less in the mood for writing. “I cannot make a beginning. And I am sad--so sad! Life is slipping away. I long to _work_, and am obliged to _drudge_ in order to live. Adieu, adieu.” XXXII POOR OPHELIA I would I were done with these wearisome reminiscences! When I have written a few pages more I shall have said enough to give a fair sketch of the mill-round of thought, work and sorrow wherein I am fated to turn, until I cease to turn for ever. However long may still be the days of my pilgrimage, they can but resemble those that are past. The same stony roads, the same Slough of Despond, with here and there a blessed oasis of [Illustration: MONTMARTRE CEMETERY] rest or a mighty rock that I may painfully climb, thereon to forget, in the evening sunshine, the cold rains of the plain beneath. So slow are changes in men and things that one would need to live two hundred years to mark any difference. Nanci, my sister, died of cancer, after six months’ frightful suffering. Adèle, worn out with the fatigue and anxiety of nursing, nearly followed her. Why had no doctor the humanity to put an end to that awful martyrdom with a little chloroform? They administer it to avoid the pain of an operation that lasts, perhaps, an hour, and they refuse it when they know cure to be impossible, to spare months of torture, when death would be the supreme good. Even savages are more humane. But no doubt my sister would have refused the boon had it been offered. She would have said, “God’s will be done!” Would not God’s will have been as well interpreted by a calm, swift death as by these months of useless agony? * * * * * My wife, too, died--mercifully without much suffering. After four years’ death-in-life, unable to speak or move, she passed quietly away at Montmartre on the 3rd March 1854. Her last hours were sweetened by Louis’ presence. He was home on leave from Cherbourg four days before she died. I had been out for two hours when one of her nurses came to tell me all was over, and I returned but to draw aside the shroud and kiss her pale forehead. Her portrait, painted in the days of her radiant beauty, and which I had given her the year before, hung above her bed, looking calmly down on the poor shell that had once enshrined her brilliant genius. My sufferings were indescribable. They were intensified by one feeling that has always been the hardest for me to bear--that of pity.