pelled to husband his means, he threw himself into agricultural
pursuits and began to find some happiness in life. But the birth of his
first child, Jacques, was a thunderbolt which ruined both the past and
the future. The doctor declared the child had not vitality enough to
live. The count concealed this sentence from the mother; but he sought
other advice, and received the same fatal answer, the truth of which
was confirmed at the subsequent birth of Madeleine. These events and a
certain inward consciousness of the cause of this disaster increased the
diseased tendencies of the man himself. His name doomed to extinction, a
pure and irreproachable young woman made miserable beside him and doomed
to the anguish of maternity without its joys--this uprising of his
former into his present life, with its growth of new sufferings, crushed
his spirit and completed its destruction.

The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.
Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows
himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an
angel. She became stoical. Descending into an abyss, whence she still
could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as
the sister of charity devotes herself to many. To reconcile him with
himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness. The count
grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed. Like all who have
known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared betrayal;
she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his mistrust. With
a woman's tact she made him will to do that which was right, till he
fancied the ideas were his own, and thus enjoyed in his own person the
honors of a superiority that was never his. After due experience of
married life, she came to the resolution of never leaving Clochegourde;
for she saw the hysterical tendencies of the count's nature, and feared
the outbreaks which might be talked of in that gossipping and jealous
neighborhood to the injury of her children. Thus, thanks to her, no one
suspected Monsieur de Mortsauf's real incapacity, for she wrapped
his ruins in a mantle of ivy. The fickle, not merely discontented but
embittered nature of the man found rest and ease in his wife; his secret
anguish was lessened by the balm she shed upon it.

This brief history is in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur de
Chessel by his inward vexation. His knowledge