Demoustier laid his hand on hers and, looking at her, he said:—
"Dear Madame Dumas, we must not delude ourselves: I can no longer take broth or milk or water, so I must die."
And he died next day with a smile upon his lips.
Alas! it was my mother's ambition to erect just such a stone as was put over Demoustier's resting-place; but she could not afford to consecrate the dead at the cost of the living.
I fancy I must have acquired my partiality for cemeteries, that is to say village cemeteries, from my frequent walks with my mother to the Villers-Cotterets cemetery: nothing impresses me so much even now—their churches, their tall weeping willows, their broken-off columns, and their crosses painted black, with a simple white inscription stating the name and the age of the deceased.
Alas! if I were now to return to our cemetery how many graves of friends I should find there, besides my mother's! Nearly all whom I knew in my childhood lie there, and, with Christ in the early days of Christian Rome, I could exclaim: "I have more friends under the earth than on it."
Let those who take the trouble of studying small details study the different localties where my childhood was passed: les Fossés, Antilly, the confined room at the hôtel de l'Epée, the ruined castle of Villers-Cotterets, the house and the town garden of M. Deviolaine, the cloister at Saint-Remy, the château of Villers-Hellon, the grand park of François I., of Henri II. and of Henri IV., and the little cemetery of Pieux,—the name of the place where the Villers-Cotterets cemetery was situated,—and they may find the origins of many qualities in my books, of many traits in my character.
To all these my early impressions I owe my deep respect for all holy things, my deep faith in Providence and my great love of God. Never, throughout my long life, have I had one moment of despair, one minute of doubt, not even in the darkest hours of life; I dare not say I am certain of the immortality of my soul, but I can go as far as to say I hope in it. I believe that death is a forgetting of the past without being a renunciation of the future. If science succeeds in endowing spirits with memory it will have solved the great mystery, of which God has hitherto kept the key; souls will then remember, and immortality be laid bare to us.
But to conclude. In the midst of these walks and games and early schooling, I was growing up, I could play the Marche des Samnites and the Overture to Lodoïska, upon my violin, and Hiraux, with his black cap pulled down over his ears, was confessing to my mother that he was too honest to steal from her any longer the ten francs per month which she gave him to make a musician of me.
I was very ready to give up these lessons, and I should have done so long before, had my attraction for Hiraux not surmounted my dislike of the solfeggio. I renounced them, too, the more eagerly as I had now begun taking lessons far more seductive to my mind—namely, lessons in fencing.