And, all at once, another memory flashed upon the young priest, the terrible memory of the day when his father had died, killed in his laboratory by an accident, the explosion of a retort.

He, Pierre, had then been five years old, and he remembered the slightest incidents--his mother's cry when she had found the shattered body among the remnants of the chemical appliances, then her terror, her sobs, her prayers at the idea that God had slain the unbeliever, damned him for evermore.

Not daring to burn his books and papers, she had contented herself with locking up the laboratory, which henceforth nobody entered.

And from that moment, haunted by a vision of hell, she had had but one idea, to possess herself of her second son, who was still so young, to give him a strictly religious training, and through him to ransom her husband--secure his forgiveness from God.
Guillaume, her elder boy, had already ceased to belong to her, having grown up at college, where he had been won over by the ideas of the century; but she resolved that the other, the younger one, should not leave the house, but should have a priest as tutor; and her secret dream, her consuming hope, was that she might some day see him a priest himself, saying his first mass and solacing souls whom the thought of eternity tortured.
Then between green, leafy boughs, flecked with sunlight, another figure rose vividly before Pierre's eyes.

He suddenly beheld Marie de Guersaint as he had seen her one morning through a gap in the hedge dividing the two gardens.