He felt that she was overcome and began to be ashamed of his own weakness:
“Well,” he said, mastering himself, “we must just wait. After all, the attack may not materialize. The fact of our being locked in does not mean that we are lost. And, even so, we shall make a fight for it, shall we not? You need not think that I am at the end of my strength or my resources. Let us wait, Coralie, and act.”
The main thing was to find out whether there was any entrance to the house which could allow of an unforeseen attack. After an hour’s search they took up the carpet and found tiles which showed nothing unusual. There was certainly nothing except the door, and, as they could not prevent this from being opened, since it opened outwards, they heaped up most of the furniture in front of it, thus forming a barricade which would protect them against a surprise.
Then Patrice cocked his two revolvers and placed them beside him, in full sight.
“This will make us easy in our minds,” he said. “Any enemy who appears is a dead man.”
But the memory of the past bore down upon them with all its awful weight. All their words and all their actions others before them had spoken and performed, under similar conditions, with the same thoughts and the same forebodings. Patrice’s father must have prepared his weapons. Coralie’s mother must have folded her hands and prayed. Together they had barricaded the door and together sounded the walls and taken up the carpet. What an anguish was this, doubled as it was by a like anguish!
To dispel the horror of the idea, they turned the pages of the books, works of fiction and others, which their parents had read. On certain pages, at the end of a chapter or volume, were lines constituting notes which Patrice’s father and Coralie’s mother used to write each other.
“Darling Patrice,
“I ran in this morning to recreate our life of yesterday and to dream of our life this afternoon. As you will arrive before me, you will read these lines. You will read that I love you. . . .”
And, in another book: