"Come, come, be reasonable; eat and let me eat."

He would sigh and break off a mouthful of bread, which he would then chew
slowly.

For five years they had no children. Then suddenly she announced to him
that this state of affairs would soon cease. He was wild with joy. He no
longer left her for a minute, until his old nurse, who had brought him up
and who often ruled the house, would push him out and close the door
behind him, in order to compel him to go out in the fresh air.

He had grown very intimate with a young man who had known his wife since
childhood, and who was one of the prefect's secretaries. M. Duretour
would dine three times a week with the Lemonniers, bringing flowers to
madame, and sometimes a box at the theater; and often, at the end of the
dinner, Lemonnier, growing tender, turning towards his wife, would
explain: "With a companion like you and a friend like him, a man is
completely happy on earth."

She died in childbirth. The shock almost killed him. But the sight of the
child, a poor, moaning little creature, gave him courage.

He loved it with a passionate and sorrowful love, with a morbid love in
which stuck the memory of death, but in which lived something of his
worship for the dead mother. It was the flesh of his wife, her being
continued, a sort of quintessence of herself. This child was her very
life transferred to another body; she had disappeared that it might
exist, and the father would smother it in with kisses. But also, this
child had killed her; he had stolen this beloved creature, his life was