CHAPTER IV.
THE HOSPITAL.
It will be remembered that Fleur-de-Marie, saved by La Louve, had been conveyed not far from the Isle du Ravageur to the country-house of Doctor Griffon, one of the surgeons of the hospital, to whom we shall now introduce the reader. This learned doctor, who had obtained from high influence his position in the hospital, considered the wards as a kind of school of experiments, where he tried on the poor the remedies and applications which he afterwards used with his rich clients.
These terrible experiments were, indeed, a human sacrifice made on the altar of science; but Doctor Griffon did not think of that. In the eyes of this prince of science, as they say in our days, the hospital patients were only a matter of study and experiment; and as, after all, there resulted from his essays occasionally a useful fact or a discovery acquired by science, the doctor showed himself as ingenuously satisfied and triumphant as a general after a victory which has been costly in soldiers.
Nothing could be more melancholy than the sombre appearance of the vast ward of the hospital, into which we now introduce the reader. The length of its high, dark walls, pierced here and there with grated windows like those of a prison, was filled with two rows of beds parallel, and faintly lighted by the sepulchral glare of a lamp hanging from the ceiling. The atmosphere is so nauseous, so heavy, that the fresh patients frequently did not become accustomed to it without danger, and this increase of suffering is a sort of tax which every newcomer invariably pays for his miserable sojourn in the hospital. In one of the beds was the corpse of a patient who had just died.
Amongst the females who did not sleep, and who had been present whilst the priest performed the last rites with the dying woman, were three persons whose names have been already mentioned in this history,—Mlle. de Fermont, the daughter of the unfortunate widow ruined by the cupidity of Jacques Ferrand; La Lorraine, the poor laundress, to whom Fleur-de-Marie had formerly given the small sum of money she had left; and Jeanne Duport, the sister of Pique-Vinaigre.
La Lorraine was a woman about twenty, with mild and regular features, but extremely pale and thin; she was consumptive to the last degree, and there was no hope of saving her. She was aware of her condition, and was slowly dying.
"There is another gone!" said La Lorraine, in a faint voice, and speaking to herself. "She will suffer no more; she is very happy!"