Ah! what a terrible year had the first been, spent in his little house at Neuilly, with doors and windows ever closed, burrowing there like some wounded animal suffering unto death.

He had come back from Lourdes with his soul desolate, his heart bleeding, with nought but ashes within him.

Silence and darkness fell upon the ruins of his love and his faith.

Days and days went by, without a pulsation of his veins, without the faintest gleam arising to brighten the gloom of his abandonment.

His life was a mechanical one; he awaited the necessary courage to resume the tenor of existence in the name of sovereign reason, which had imposed upon him the sacrifice of everything.