"
Mathieu consented, and in the room upstairs he beheld one of the most
frightful, poignant spectacles that he had ever witnessed. In the centre
of that one room where the family slept and ate, Euphrasie sat on a
straw-bottomed chair; and although she was barely thirty years of age,
one might have taken her for a little old woman of fifty; so thin and so
withered did she look that she resembled one of those fruits, suddenly
deprived of sap, that dry up on the tree. Her teeth had fallen, and of
her hair she only retained a few white locks. But the more characteristic
mark of this mature senility was a wonderful loss of muscular strength,
an almost complete disappearance of will, energy, and power of action, so
that she now spent whole days, idle, stupefied, without courage even to
raise a finger.
When Cecile told her that her visitor was M. Froment, the former chief
designer at the Beauchene works, she did not even seem to recognize him;
she no longer took interest in anything. And when her sister spoke of the
object of her visit, asking for the work with which she had entrusted
her, she answered with a gesture of utter weariness: "Oh! what can you
expect! It takes me too long to stick all those little bits of cardboard
together.
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