They sat wrapped in an infinite silence. They perceived the first smell of gas descending around them, but they felt no fear.
“Everything will happen as it did before, Coralie,” whispered Patrice, “down to the very last second. Your mother and my father, who loved each other as we do, also died in each other’s arms, with their lips joined together. They had decided to unite us and they have united us.”
“Our grave will be near theirs,” she murmured.
Little by little their ideas became confused and they began to think much as a man sees through a rising mist. They had had nothing to eat; and hunger now added its discomfort to the vertigo in which their minds were imperceptibly sinking. As it increased, their uneasiness and anxiety left them, to be followed by a sense of ecstasy, then lassitude, extinction, repose. The dread of the coming annihilation faded out of their thoughts.
Coralie, the first to be affected, began to utter delirious words which astonished Patrice at first:
“Dearest, there are flowers falling, roses all around us. How delightful!”
Presently he himself grew conscious of the same blissful exaltation, expressing itself in tenderness and joyful emotion. With no sort of dismay he felt her gradually yielding in his arms and abandoning herself; and he had the impression that he was following her down a measureless abyss, all bathed with light, where they floated, he and she, descending slowly and without effort towards a happy valley.
Minutes or perhaps hours passed. They were still descending, he supporting her by the waist, she with her head thrown back a little way, her eyes closed and a smile upon her lips. He remembered pictures showing gods thus gliding through the blue of heaven; and, drunk with pure, radiant light and air, he continued to circle above the happy valley.
But, as he approached it, he felt himself grow weary. Coralie weighed heavily on his bent arm. The descent increased in speed. The waves of light turned to darkness. A thick cloud came, followed by others that formed a whirl of gloom.
And suddenly, worn out, his forehead bathed in sweat and his body shaking with fever, he pitched forward into a great black pit. . . .