served the chaste fire of those eyes, that none but he can discern in
the tones of that voice, in the words it utters, however gay or jesting
they may be, the proofs of unremitting thought. The count, delighted
with the attentions paid to him, seemed almost young; his wife looked
hopeful of a change; I amused myself with Madeleine, who, like all
children with bodies weaker than their minds, made others laugh with her
clever observations, full of sarcasm, though never malicious, and
which spared no one. It was a happy day. A word, a hope awakened in the
morning illumined nature. Seeing me so joyous, Henriette was joyful too.

"This happiness smiling on my gray and cloudy life seems good," she said
to me the next day.

That day I naturally spent at Clochegourde. I had been banished for five
days, I was athirst for life. The count left at six in the morning for
Tours. A serious disagreement had arisen between mother and daughter.
The duchess wanted the countess to move to Paris, where she promised her
a place at court, and where the count, reconsidering his refusal, might
obtain some high position. Henriette, who was thought happy in
her married life, would not reveal, even to her mother, her tragic
sufferings and the fatal incapacity of her husband. It was to hide his
condition from the duchess that she persuaded him to go to Tours and
transact business with his notaries. I alone, as she had truly said,
knew the dark secret of Clochegourde. Having learned by experience
how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely valley calmed the
excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the diseased mind, and what
beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had upon the health of her
children, she opposed her mother's desire that she should leave it with
reasons which the overbearing woman, who was less grieved than mortified
by her daughter's bad marriage, vigorously combated.

Henriette saw that the duchess cared little for Jacques and
Madeleine,--a terrible discovery! Like all domineering mothers who
expect to continue the same authority over their married daughters that
they maintained when they were girls, the duchess brooked no opposition;
sometimes she affected a crafty sweetness to force her daughter to
compliance, at other times a cold severity, intending to obtain by fear
what gentleness had failed to win; then, when all means failed, she
displayed the same native sarcasm which I had often observed in my own
mother. In