profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his
parish church--those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her,
after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where
she had dragged her fault. "At least, my poor Franchita, my daughter, are
you in a country where the men are pious and go to church regularly?--"
Oh! no, they were hardly pious, the men of the great city, not more the
fashionable ones who were in the society of Ramuntcho's father than the
humblest laborers in the suburban district where she lived hidden; all
carried away by the same current far from the hereditary dogmas, far from
the antique symbols.--And Ramuntcho, in such surroundings, how would he
resist?--

Other reasons, less important perhaps, retained her also. Her haughty
dignity, which in that city had maintained her honest and solitary,
revolted truly at the idea that she would have to reappear as a solicitor
before her former lover. Then, her superior commonsense, which nothing
had ever been able to lead astray or to dazzle, told her that it was too
late now to change anything; that Ramuntcho, until now ignorant and free,
would not know how to attain the dangerous regions where the intelligence
of his father had elevated itself, but that he would languish at the
bottom, like one outclassed. And, in fine, a sentiment which she hardly
confessed to herself, lingered powerfully in the depths of her heart: the
fear of losing her son, of guiding him no longer, of holding him no
longer, of having him no longer.--And so, in that instant of decisive
reflection, after having hesitated for years, she inclined more and more
to remain stubborn in her silence with regard to the stranger and to let
pass humbly near her the life of her Ramuntcho, under the protecting
looks of the Virgin and the saints.--There remained unsolved the question
of Gracieuse Detcharry.--Well, she would marry, in spite of everything,
her son, smuggler and poor though he be! With her instinct of a mother