reat love he would have
made me awkward and stupid by affecting to believe that I knew nothing
of life. He presented me in society under the expectation that my
dulness would be a foil to his qualities. Had I not remembered the
sorrows of my childhood I might have taken his protecting vanity for
brotherly affection; but inward solitude produces the same effects
as outward solitude; silence within our souls enables us to hear the
faintest sound; the habit of taking refuge within ourselves develops
a perception which discerns every quality of the affections about us.
Before I knew Madame de Mortsauf a hard look grieved me, a rough word
wounded me to the heart; I bewailed these things without as yet knowing
anything of a life of tenderness; whereas now, since my return from
Clochegourde, I could make comparisons which perfected my instinctive
perceptions. All deductions derived only from sufferings endured are
incomplete. Happiness has a light to cast. I now allowed myself the more
willingly to be kept under the heel of primogeniture because I was not
my brother's dupe.

I always went alone to the Duchesse de Lenoncourt's, where Henriette's
name was never mentioned; no one, except the good old duke, who was
simplicity itself, ever spoke of her to me; but by the way he welcomed
me I guessed that his daughter had privately commended me to his care.
At the moment when I was beginning to overcome the foolish wonder and
shyness which besets a young man at his first entrance into the great
world, and to realize the pleasures it could give through the resources
it offers to ambition, just, too, as I was beginning to make use of
Henriette's maxims, admiring their wisdom, the events of the 20th of
March took place.

My brother followed the court to Ghent; I, by Henriette's advice (for I
kept up a correspondence with her, active on my side only), went there
also with the Duc de Lenoncourt. The natural kindness of the old duke
turned to a hearty and sincere protection as soon as he saw me attached,
body and soul, to the Bourbons. He himself presented me to his Majesty.
Courtiers are not numerous when misfortunes are rife; but youth is
gifted with ingenuous admiration and uncalculating fidelity. The king
had the faculty of judging men; a devotion which might have passed
unobserved in Paris counted for much at Ghent, and I had the happiness
of pleasing Louis XVIII.

A letter from Madame de Mortsauf to her father, brought with despat