moment when they were needed, she gave to her husband, not telling him
they were gifts and savings of her own. He took no account of them, and
never regarded himself her debtor. She did not even obtain the glance
of thanks that would have paid for all. Ah! how she went from trial to
trial! Monsieur de Mortsauf habitually neglected to give her money for
the household. When, after a struggle with her timidity, she asked him
for it, he seemed surprised and never once spared her the mortification
of petitioning for necessities. What terror filled her mind when the
real nature of the ruined man's disease was revealed to her, and
she quailed under the first outbreak of his mad anger! What bitter
reflections she had made before she brought herself to admit that her
husband was a wreck! What horrible calamities had come of her bearing
children! What anguish she felt at the sight of those infants born
almost dead! With what courage had she said in her heart: "I will
breathe the breath of life into them; I will bear them anew day by day!"
Then conceive the bitterness of finding her greatest obstacle in the
heart and hand from which a wife should draw her greatest succor! She
saw the untold disaster that threatened him. As each difficulty was
conquered, new deserts opened before her, until the day when she
thoroughly understood her husband's condition, the constitution of her
children, and the character of the neighborhood in which she lived;
a day when (like the child taken by Napoleon from a tender home) she
taught her feet to trample through mud and snow, she trained her nerves
to bullets and all her being to the passive obedience of a soldier.

These things, of which I here make a summary, she told me in all their
dark extent, with every piteous detail of conjugal battles lost and
fruitless struggles.

"You would have to live here many months," she said, in conclusion, "to
understand what difficulties I have met with in improving Clochegourde;
what persuasions I have had to use to make him do a thing which was most
important to his interests. You cannot imagine the childish glee he has
shown when anything that I advised was not at once successful. All that
turned out well he claimed for himself. Yes, I need an infinite patience
to bear his complaints when I am half-exhausted in the effort to amuse
his weary hours, to sweeten his life and smooth the paths which he
himself has strewn with stones. The reward he gives me is that