"He is the best of men; he is my ideal."
"What do you think of that horrid Henri?"
"I had to summon all my courage when he looked at me so fixedly, a cold sweat came on my forehead. He is capable of killing both of us."
"No! He is not susceptible of so violent an emotion. We ought to pardon him, for he suffers keenly."
"Oh, no! I know better than that. He will easily console himself."
The baron was impatient to depart, and coughed to bring back his wife from the grotto. At last the two friends separated, saying farewell, and Muse bowed to Henri from the distance, with a grave dignity. The brilliant star entered her carriage and disappeared in a cloud of dust on the highway. Jacob conducted his wife to her room in the inn and descended to the grotto.
Gromof and the Tsigane came to talk with him. The Russian saw the future outlook dark and gloomy. Jacob was rather optimistic.
"Man," said he, "ought never to abandon himself to despair. If he object to his own individual lot, it is narrow-minded and weak. If he complain of the lot of humanity, it is blindness or error. In the annals of the world human events are submitted to a normal development, an intelligent fatality which is not arrested by the stupidity and malevolence of men. The law of destiny, whatever we may do, will prevail. Patience, and the storm will disappear."
"And we,--we cannot expect to live to see the sun appear!"
"Our children will see it, perhaps. In the collective existence of humanity there is a cohesion of facts which do not exist in the same individual existences. Individuals are only the stones of a vast edifice."