he is so beautiful--an angel!"

Maxime, who was still pale, and who shivered in spite of the stifling
heat, put no more questions. He looked at the vast buildings of the
asylum, the wings of the various quarters separated by gardens, the
men's quarters from those of the women, those of the harmless insane
from those of the violent insane. A scrupulous cleanliness reigned
everywhere, a gloomy silence--broken from time to time by footsteps
and the noise of keys. Old Macquart knew all the keepers. Besides, the
doors were always to open to Dr. Pascal, who had been authorized to
attend certain of the inmates. They followed a passage and entered a
court; it was here--one of the chambers on the ground floor, a room
covered with a light carpet, furnished with a bed, a press, a table,
an armchair, and two chairs. The nurse, who had orders never to quit
her charge, happened just now to be absent, and the only occupants of
the room were the madwoman, sitting rigid in her armchair at one side
of the table, and the boy, sitting on a chair on the opposite side,
absorbed in cutting out his pictures.

"Go in, go in!" Macquart repeated. "Oh, there is no danger, she is
very gentle!"

The grandmother, Adelaide Fouque, whom her grandchildren, a whole
swarm of descendants, called by the pet name of Aunt Dide, did not
even turn her head at the noise. In her youth hysterical troubles had
unbalanced her mind. Of an ardent and passionate nature and subject to
nervous attacks, she had yet reached the great age of eighty-three
when a dreadful grief, a terrible moral shock, destroyed her reason.
At that time, twenty-one years before, her mind had ceased to act; it
had become suddenly weakened without the possibility of recovery. And