What was his duty? He had no sooner propounded that question than it occupied the whole field of his thought. How gladly he would have asked advice of some one! But of whom? As he passed through his library again, after he had dressed, on his way down to the salons on the ground floor, his glance fell upon a portrait of his mother, and he stopped to gaze at it, as if the face of the dead might take on life to sustain him, to give him a hint. Alas! to no purpose would his filial piety have questioned for days and days the delicate and deceitful features which had been those of the beautiful Madame de Claviers. He would have derived nothing but doubts concerning her, had the denunciator carried to the end his confidences concerning the secret sorrows of the family. That portrait was of 1878. Landri was just born, and Madame de Claviers was thirty years old. She was painted sitting down, in a red velvet evening gown, which left bare her lovely arms, her supple shoulders, her neck, a trifle long, about which gleamed a row of enormous pearls. She had a very small head, with an abundance of chestnut hair, a mouth of sinuous shape, upon which flickered a smile, but impersonal and seemingly forced. The eyes, whose expression was at once dreamy and observing, passionate and guarded, contradicted the artificial banality of that smile. It was the image of a woman, very sweet and very simple at first glance, very complex at the second, and quite unintelligible,--a happy woman, but whose happiness was of that deep-seated and perturbed sort that never comes to fruition, being condemned, by sin, to remain concealed.