the
possessions, the woods, the arable lands, the meadows, of a neighbor who
was not of noble birth. Monsieur de Chessel fully understood this. They
always met politely; but there was none of that daily intercourse or
that agreeable intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde
and Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose
mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows.

Jealousy, however, was not the sole reason for the solitude in which the
Count de Mortsauf lived. His early education was that of the children
of great families,--an incomplete and superficial instruction as to
knowledge, but supplemented by the training of society, the habits of a
court life, and the exercise of important duties under the crown or in
eminent offices. Monsieur de Mortsauf had emigrated at the very
moment when the second stage of his education was about to begin, and
accordingly that training was lacking to him. He was one of those
who believed in the immediate restoration of the monarchy; with that
conviction in his mind, his exile was a long and miserable period of
idleness. When the army of Conde, which his courage led him to join with
the utmost devotion, was disbanded, he expected to find some other post
under the white flag, and never sought, like other emigrants, to take up
an industry. Perhaps he had not the sort of courage that could lay aside
his name and earn his living in the sweat of a toil he despised. His
hopes, daily postponed to the morrow, and possibly a scruple of honor,
kept him from offering his services to foreign powers. Trials undermined
his courage. Long tramps afoot on insufficient nourishment, and above
all, on hopes betrayed, injured his health and discouraged his mind. By
degrees he became utterly destitute. If to some men misery is a tonic,
on others it acts as a dissolvent; and the count was of the latter.

Reflecting on the life of this poor Touraine gentleman, tramping and
sleeping along the highroads of Hungary, sharing the mutton of Prince
Esterhazy's shepherds, from whom the foot-worn traveller begged the food
he would not, as a gentleman, have accepted at the table of the master,
and refusing again and again to do service to the enemies of France, I
never found it in my heart to feel bitterness against him, even when I
saw him at his worst in after days. The natural gaiety of a Frenchman
and a Tourangean soon deserted him; he became morose, fell ill, and