And I wondered, wondered, wondered what the police were doing! I received letters in which I was told that the Affaire of the Impasse Ronsin was being "classée," that is put aside, abandoned, given up.... And at the same time I heard public opinion was still against me. One letter written in vulgar slang and forwarded from Paris, said "You are the assassin; only, as you are highly connected (comme vous connaissez des gens de la haute) the police are not doing what they would do in the case of any poor wretch.... You coward, you have gone and hidden yourself in the country!..." Even the two or three "former" friends who occasionally wrote to me, gave me to understand that the pleasant relations, the friendship of the old days, would be impossible "until the murderers had been arrested." As if I knew where they were! As if I had only to call them or point to them and have them arrested! As if I were not more anxious than any one on earth to know who were the murderers of my husband and my mother!...
There are mental pains which are almost unbearable, and none greater perhaps than to see the being one loves best in all the world suffer near you.... Marthe, brave little girl that she was, tried to smile so as to give me courage to live. We spent long hours, under a tree or in the fields... in silence. I watched her, so worn, so pale, her pallor heightened by her mourning dress, her head bent down, her eyes filled with tears which she dared not shed. She knew my thoughts, and I knew hers. Her mind was in Paris.... She thought of her father, of her grandmother... and of Pierre, her fiancé, her lover, who no longer wrote... who would never write to her again, until the murderers were arrested. Not that he believed I was guilty, but probably because, like his parents, he dreaded Public Opinion....
And as I turned and turned these thoughts over in my distracted mind, I grew more and more resolute.... Public Opinion, indeed! Well, I would face it! I would go to the bitter end—and the end was bitter, my God!—I would look for those assassins, who after making two victims were now claiming two more, my child and myself, I would hunt them down, and if the Law were reluctant or disheartened, if the Law refused to go on with the search, I would force the Law to do its duty....
A letter came, at that moment, a letter from M. Marcel Hutin, a journalist on the staff of the Echo de Paris and the friend of a friend of mine. He told me that most people were still against me, and that he had placed himself entirely at my disposal.
I wrote a long letter to Maître Antony Aubin, entreating him to reproach the authorities for their apathy....
A little pacified, I tried to forget my trial, and, knowing that the best antidote to haunting thoughts and fixed ideas is work, I started with Marthe's assistance to decorate the whole house of our host and hostess.... We painted ornaments, huge decorative flowers, altered the appearance of the rooms, and even improved the gardens....
Sometimes we went to the seaside, or made an excursion to some beauty spot in Normandy. Once again I began to "forget." This country life was beautiful and simple. I thought of Beaucourt, and, as I watched Marthe, I said to myself: "How my father would have loved her!" The sorrow written in such pathetic lines on her sweet face—so young and fresh that it should not as yet have shown care or pain—made me ashamed to think of my own overwhelming grief. Seeing that the simple healthy life we led did us much good, our friends suggested that we should take half their house, and settle down permanently in Normandy....
But Marthe shook her little head. She longed to return to Paris, to see Pierre at all costs, to hear his voice.... And I was more than anxious to go on with the Impasse Ronsin affair—to press inquiries, to trace the murderers, to solve that mystery which was ruining my child's happiness, and which made me the most miserable and most unjustly abused creature in the world....
With all my heart I thanked our friends. Our stay with them if it had not cured our minds, had strengthened our bodies, and Marthe and I had both known many an hour of comforting peace.
At the end of August we left Louvières and returned to Bellevue. We would not go to the Impasse Ronsin yet, for the house was in the hands of the builders, who were dividing it, so that I could let a part of it, as well as the vast studio.