III.

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# III. ## Overview This document is section "III." of a larger work, extracted from the file `pierre.txt`. It falls within the chapter titled "[BOOK XI. HE CROSSES THE RUBICON](arke:01KG8AJSPVVTWQ1CZ613PM0PJH)". ## Context This section is part of the "[Melville Complete Works](arke:01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW)" collection. It follows section "[II.](arke:01KG8AKTMJ878XHCX4Q0PK433B)" and precedes section "[IV.](arke:01KG8AKTMJM6HWFRS8VPD82FFQ)". ## Contents This section contains a narrative passage. Pierre encounters his mother on the stairs, where a marble sculpture of Laocoön and his children is described. He informs his mother of his marriage, which she receives with anger and scorn, banishing him from her home. As Pierre leaves the house, he trips and falls on the portico.

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III.

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8247

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2026-01-30T20:48:07.471Z

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III. "Is my mother up yet?" said he to Dates, whom he met in the hall. "Not yet, sir;--heavens, sir! are you sick?" "To death! Let me pass." Ascending toward his mother's chamber, he heard a coming step, and met her on the great middle landing of the stairs, where in an ample niche, a marble group of the temple-polluting Laocoon and his two innocent children, caught in inextricable snarls of snakes, writhed in eternal torments. "Mother, go back with me to thy chamber." She eyed his sudden presence with a dark but repressed foreboding; drew herself up haughtily and repellingly, and with a quivering lip, said, "Pierre, thou thyself hast denied me thy confidence, and thou shall not force me back to it so easily. Speak! what is that now between thee and me?" "I am married, mother." "Great God! To whom?" "Not to Lucy Tartan, mother." "That thou merely sayest 'tis not Lucy, without saying who indeed it is, this is good proof she is something vile. Does Lucy know thy marriage?" "I am but just from Lucy's." Thus far Mrs. Glendinning's rigidity had been slowly relaxing. Now she clutched the balluster, bent over, and trembled, for a moment. Then erected all her haughtiness again, and stood before Pierre in incurious, unappeasable grief and scorn for him. "My dark soul prophesied something dark. If already thou hast not found other lodgment, and other table than this house supplies, then seek it straight. Beneath my roof, and at my table, he who was once Pierre Glendinning no more puts himself." She turned from him, and with a tottering step climbed the winding stairs, and disappeared from him; while in the balluster he held, Pierre seemed to feel the sudden thrill running down to him from his mother's convulsive grasp. He stared about him with an idiot eye; staggered to the floor below, to dumbly quit the house; but as he crossed its threshold, his foot tripped upon its raised ledge; he pitched forward upon the stone portico, and fell. He seemed as jeeringly hurled from beneath his own ancestral roof.

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III.