She slowly passed away, not once removing her gaze from him, and as he paled beneath it, this gaze grew more and more benign. She forgave with her last sigh. She died as she had lived, tamely; her diffidence in life attending her till death. Saccard stood shivering before the dead woman's eyes, which remained wide open, and transfixed him by their very immobility. Little Clotilde nursed her doll on the edge of the sheet, very gently though, so as not to wake her mother. When Madame Sidonie got back it was all over. Like a woman in the habit of performing such operations, she deftly closed Angèle's eyes with a touch of her fingers, and this was an immense relief to Saccard. Then, after putting the little girl to bed, she quickly arranged the room as befits the chamber of death. When she had lighted two candles on the chest of drawers, and carefully drawn the sheet up to the chin of the corpse, she cast a satisfied glance around her, and ensconced herself in an easy-chair, where she dozed till daybreak. Saccard passed the night in the adjoining room, writing letters announcing his wife's death. He interrupted himself now and again, musing and adding up columns of figures on odd bits of paper. On the evening of the day of the funeral, Madame Sidonie took Saccard to her apartment on the mezzanine floor, and grand resolutions were formed there. The civil servant decided that he would send little Clotilde to one of his brothers, Pascal Rougon, a doctor at Plassans, who led a bachelor life, wrapt up in the love of science, and who had often offered to take his niece to live with him to enliven his silent home. Madame Sidonie then made Saccard understand that he could no longer sojourn in the Rue Saint-Jacques. She would take an elegantly furnished apartment for him for a month, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Hôtel de Ville; she would try to find this apartment in a private house, so that the furniture should appear to belong to him. As to the chattels in the Rue Saint-Jacques, they should all be sold, so as to efface every trace of the past. He could use the money in buying himself a trousseau and some decent clothes.