For some time the young girl had been getting weaker and weaker, and she had been obliged to take to her bed two days earlier. ‘Tell her I’ll come straight away,’ Denise replied, very worried. It was the sudden disappearance of Colomban which was killing Geneviève. At first, because Clara had teased him, he had not returned home for several nights; then, yielding to the mad desire which can take possession of shifty, chaste young men, he had become her obedient slave, and one Monday had not returned, but had simply left a farewell letter for his employer, written in the studied terms of a man about to commit suicide. Perhaps one could also have read into this sudden passion the shrewd calculation of a young man delighted to escape from a disastrous marriage; the drapery shop was just as sick as his future wife and it was the right moment to break it all off by doing something foolish. Everyone cited him as a fatal victim of love. When Denise arrived at the Vieil Elbeuf, Madame Baudu was there alone.
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