ed from view beneath the lofty ceilings whence darkness fell.
The flooring of red-colored tiles was cold and hard to the feet;
before the chairs there were merely a few threadbare little rugs of
poverty-stricken aspect, and athwart this desert all the winds of heaven
blew through the disjointed doors and windows.

Near the fireplace sat Mme Burle, leaning back in her old yellow velvet
armchair and watching the last vine branch smoke, with that stolid,
blank stare of the aged who live within themselves. She would sit thus
for whole days together, with her tall figure, her long stern face and
her thin lips that never smiled. The widow of a colonel who had died
just as he was on the point of becoming a general, the mother of a
captain whom she had followed even in his campaigns, she had acquired
a military stiffness of bearing and formed for herself a code of honor,
duty and patriotism which kept her rigid, desiccated, as it were, by the
stern application of discipline. She seldom, if ever, complained. When
her son had become a widower after five years of married life she
had undertaken the education of little Charles as a matter of course,
performing her duties with the severity of a sergeant drilling recruits.
She watched over the child, never tolerating the slightest waywardness
or irregularity, but compelling him to sit up till midnight when
his exercises were not finished, and sitting up herself until he
had completed them. Under such implacable despotism Charles, whose
constitution was delicate, grew up pale and thin, with beautiful eyes,
inordinately large and clear, shining in his white, pinched face.

During the long hours of silence Mme Burle dwelt continuously upon one
and the same idea: she had been disappointed in her son. This thought
sufficed to occupy her mind, and under its influence she would live her
whole life over again, from the birth of her son, whom she had pictured
rising amid glory to the highest rank, till she came down to mean and
narrow garrison life, the dull, monotonous existence of nowadays, that
stranding in the post of a quartermaster, from which Burle would never
rise and in which he seemed to sink more and more heavily. And yet his
first efforts had filled her with pride, and she had hoped to see
her dreams realized. Burle had only just left Saint-Cyr when he
distinguished himself at the battle of Solferino, where he had captured
a whole battery of the enemy's artillery with merely a han