death, symbolized by the coffin, which is calling, but Julie herself. And the prey is not just Claire, but includes Saint-Preux as well. These last few ambiguous phrases of the novel, emphasized by their strategic position, serve as a sinister guidepost to the undercurrent being traced. The ambiguity, however, is prepared for early in the book. When Claire calls Saint-Preux to Julie's graveside at the end, she is calling him to his death just as surely as she was the intercessor calling him to Julie's love bed when the latter was ill (thus bringing about the first physical encounter), and then banishing him from Julie permanently in life by persuading him to give up his lover. She is indeed, as she describes herself, that part of Julie not yet in the ground. Early in the affair, between the first and second liaisons, Saint-Preux (in exile) contemplates nature and his love: "On dirait que la terre se pare pour former a ton heureux amant un lit nuptial digne de la beaute qu'il adore et du feu qui le consume. O ma Julie! o chere et precieuse moitie de mon ame !" (Julie, I, #38). In fact, the land literally must be their "lit nuptial"; he is also a part of Julie not yet in the ground. Julie reveals in her posthumous letter that she awaits him in eternity which, for all practical purposes, is the gothic grave. The annexation of her beloved's spirit in this fashion is the counterpart of the material possession of the beloved's body demanded by Lovelace. Julie's desires are given a purged and positive (if unearthly) expression-she claims confidence in eternity-whereas the negative Lovelace fears eternal separation. He knows that he is damned while Clarissa is assured of Heaven. "An eternal separation! 0 God! How can I bear that thought" (Clarissa, p. 474). His solution is pathetically ghoulish, the opposite of Julie's concept of a personal reunion after death (although the extremes meet in Rousseau's use of the gothic grave). "Everything that can be done to preserve the charmer from decay shall also be done. And when she will descend to her original dust, or cannot be kept longer, I will then have her laid in my family vault... But her heart, to which I have such unquestionable pretensions, in which once I had so large a share, and which I will prize above my own, I will have. I will keep it in spirits" (ibid., p. 485). Thus he persists with his materialism. Although he and Julie go to opposite poles of possession here-he for the body and she for the soul-at one time they both hoped for the same compromise to the dilemma. Julie had hoped that a pregnancy would dissolve her parents'