When Jeanne had taken them to their room, she retired to her own in order to have a good cry, as she was so upset. Then she went to look for her father, and throwing herself into his arms, she exclaimed, her eyes still full of tears: "Oh, how mother is changed! What is the matter with her? Tell me, what is the matter?" He was much surprised and replied: "Do you think so? What an idea! Why, no. I have never been away from her. I assure you that I do not think she looks ill. She always looks like that." That evening Julien said to his wife: "Your mother is in a pretty bad way. I think she will not last long." And as Jeanne burst out sobbing, he became annoyed. "Come, I did not say there was no hope for her. You always exaggerate everything. She is changed, that's all. She is no longer young." The baroness was not able to walk any distance and only went out for half an hour each day to take one turn in her avenue and then she would sit on the bench. And when she felt unequal to walking to the end of her avenue, she would say: "Let us stop; my hypertrophy is breaking my legs today." She hardly ever laughed now as she did the previous year at anything that amused her, but only smiled. As she could see to read excellently, she passed hours reading "Corinne" or Lamartine's "Meditations." Then she would ask for her drawer of "souvenirs," and emptying her cherished letters on her lap, she would place the drawer on a chair beside her and put back, one by one, her "relics," after she had slowly gone over them. And when she was alone, quite alone, she would kiss some of them, as one kisses in secret a lock of hair of a loved one passed away. Sometimes Jeanne, coming in abruptly, would find her weeping and would exclaim: "What is the matter, little mother?" And the baroness, sighing deeply, would reply: "It is my 'relics' that make me cry. They stir remembrances that were so delightful and that are now past forever, and one is reminded of persons whom one had forgotten and recalls once more. You seem to see them, to hear them and it affects you strangely. You will feel this later." When the baron happened to come in at such times he would say gently: "Jeanne, dearie, take my advice and burn your letters, all of them--your mother's, mine, everyone's. There is nothing more dreadful, when one is growing old, than to look back to one's youth." But Jeanne also kept her letters, was preparing a chest of "relics" in obedience to a sort of hereditary instinct of dreamy sentimentality, although she differed from her mother in every other way. The baron was obliged to leave them some days later, as he had some business that called him away.