The physician declared his patient cured.
Cured! The body was cured, perhaps, but reason had succumbed. All traces of intelligence had disappeared from this once mobile face, so ready to assume any expression which the most consummate hypocrisy required.
There was no longer a sparkle in the eye which had formerly gleamed with cunning, and the lower lip hung with a terrible expression of stupidity.
And there was no hope of any improvement.
A single passion, the table, took the place of all the passions which had formerly swayed the life of this ambitious man.
The marquis, who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched like a child.
Often, as the marquis roamed about the large gardens, his daughter regarded him from her window with a strange terror in her heart.
But this warning of Providence only increased her desire for revenge.
“Who would not prefer death to such a misfortune?” she murmured. “Ah! Jean Lacheneur’s revenge is far more terrible than it would have been had his bullet pierced my father’s heart. It is a revenge like this that I desire. It is due me; I will have it!”
She saw Chupin every two or three days; sometimes going to the place of meeting alone, sometimes accompanied by Aunt Medea.