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wards him with outstretched arms, shouting "Death, O blessed death, take me, carry me away!" No, she knew not the cause or reason for all that. What she did know was that at such moments the image of her mother, her dead mother, was always before her, the image of her mother whom she herself, one Sunday morning, had found hanging from the chandelier in the parlor. And she again beheld the dead body which oscillated slowly in the air, she saw the face all black, the eyes all white and without pupils, she saw everything up to the sunbeam which, penetrating through the closed shutters, illuminated with a tragic light the tongue, stuck out, and the swollen lips. This anguish, these frenzies, this yearning for death, her mother had no doubt transmitted to her when she gave life to her; it is from her mother's side that she drew, it is from her mother's breast that she drank the poison, this poison which now filled her veins, with which her flesh was permeated, which fuddled her brain, which gnawed at her soul. During the intervals of calm which grew less frequent as the days, months and years passed by, she often thought of these things; and brooding over her life, recalling its remotest incidents and comparing the physical resemblances between the mother who died voluntarily and the daughter who wished to die, she felt more and more upon her the crushing weight of this lugubrious inheritance. She exalted in and completely abandoned herself to the idea that it was impossible for her to resist the fate of her ancestors who appeared to her as a long chain of suicides emerging from the depth of night, far in the past, and extending over ages to terminate . . . where? At this question her eyes became troubled, her temples grew moist with a cold sweat and her hands gripped her throat as if striving to grasp the imaginary cord, the loop of which she felt was bruis-