within her soul depths of
unexpected sweetness.

In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the
study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the
Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
"Genie du Christianisme," as a recreation. How she listened at first to
the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies re-echoing
through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
shop-parlor of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her
heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us
only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the plow. Accustomed to calm
aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement.
She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields
only when broken up by ruins. She wanted to get some personal profit out
of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to
the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more
sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes.

At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an
ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the
refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit
of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped
out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love-songs
of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched away.
She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on the
sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the
pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long
chapters in the intervals of her work. They were all love, lovers,
sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions
killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, somber
forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and kisses, little skiffs by
moonlight, nightingales in shady groves, "gentlemen" brave as lions,
gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever was, always well dressed, and
weeping like fountains. For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of
age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries. With
Walter Scott, later on, she fell