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Updated: May 22, 2025
Madame Claes's last days were thus embittered by fears and mental disquietudes which she dared not confide to others. Conscious that the recent scene had struck her death-blow, she turned her thoughts wholly to the future. Balthazar, meanwhile, now permanently unfitted for the care of property or the interests of domestic life, thought only of the Absolute.
Two years after the winter when Monsieur Claes returned to chemistry, the aspect of his house was changed. Whether it were that society was affronted by his perpetual absent-mindedness and chose to think itself in the way, or that Madame Claes's secret anxieties made her less agreeable than before, certain it is that she no longer saw any but her intimate friends.
These continual fetes, weak remedies for the real evil, only increased it. Like branches which caught him as he rolled down the precipice, they retarded Claes's fall, but in the end he fell the heavier.
Pierquin, with an appraising eye, stated that Madame Claes's possessions in her own right to use the notarial phrase might still be recovered, and ought to amount to nearly a million and a half of francs; basing this estimate partly on the forest of Waignies, whose timber, counting the full-grown trees, the saplings, the primeval growths, and the recent plantations, had immensely increased in value during the last twelve years, and partly on Balthazar's own property, of which enough remained to "cover" the claims of his children, if the liquidation of their mother's fortune did not yield sufficient to release him.
And yet, while neither bestowed the vast, though trivial, the innocent and yet all-meaning signs of love that even timid lovers allow themselves, they were so firmly fixed in each other's hearts that both were ready to make the greatest sacrifices, which were, indeed, the only pleasures their love could expect to taste. Since Madame Claes's death this hidden love was shrouded in mourning.
She was soon to be her mother's active confidante, and later, under other circumstances, a formidable judge. Madame Claes's watchful care now centred upon her eldest daughter, to whom she endeavored to communicate her own self-devotion towards Balthazar.
Several good marriages were proposed to her, which occupied Claes's mind, but to all of them she replied that she should not marry until after she was twenty-five. But in spite of his daughter's efforts, in spite of his remorseful struggles, Balthazar, at the beginning of the winter, returned secretly to his researches.
This ignorance might have caused much discord between husband and wife, but Madame Claes's understanding of the passion of love was so simple and ingenuous, she loved her husband so religiously, so sacredly, and the thought of preserving her happiness made her so adroit, that she managed always to seem to understand him, and it was seldom indeed that her ignorance was evident.
Pierquin had already decided that Madame Claes's death would have a favorable effect upon his suit, and he began mentally to cut up the body in his own interests. "That good woman," he said to himself as he went home to bed, "was as proud as a peacock; she would never gave given me her daughter. Hey, hey! why couldn't I manage matters now so as to marry the girl?
"When you have nothing left, Monsieur Claes can get no further credit; then he will stop." "Let him stop now, then," cried Marguerite, "for we are without a penny!" Monsieur de Solis went to buy up Claes's notes and returned, bringing them to Marguerite. Balthazar, contrary to his custom, came down a few moments before dinner.
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