t hard calling, as she said, for
which the Church, the Code, and her mother exhorted her to resignation
and obedience, under pain of transgressing all human laws and causing
irreparable evil, threw her into a dazed and dizzy condition, which
amounted sometimes to a species of inward delirium.

Silent and self-contained, she listened as much to herself as she did to
others. Feeling within her the most violent "difficulty of existing," to
use an expression of Fontenelle's, which was constantly increasing, she
became terrified at herself. Nature resisted the commands of the mind,
the body denied the will. The poor creature, caught in the net, wept on
the breast of that great Mother of the poor and the afflicted,--she
went for comfort to the Church; her piety redoubled, she confided the
assaults of the demon to her confessor; she prayed to heaven for succor.
Never, at any period of her life, did she fulfil her religious duties
with such fervor. The despair of not loving her husband flung her
violently at the foot of the altar, where divine and consolatory
voices urged her to patience. She was patient, she was gentle, and she
continued to live on, hoping always for the happiness of maternity.

"Did you notice Madame Graslin this morning?" the women would say to
each other. "Marriage doesn't agree with her; she is actually green."

"Yes," some of them would reply; "but would you give your daughter to a
man like Graslin? No woman could marry him with impunity."

Now that Graslin was married, all the mothers who had courted him for
ten years past pursued him with sarcasms.

Veronique grew visibly thinner and really ugly; her eyes looked weary,
her features coarsened, her manner was shy and awkward; she acquired
that air of cold and melancholy rigidity for which the ultra-pious are
so often blamed. Her skin took on a grayish tone; she dragged herself
languidly about during this first year of married life, ordinarily so
brilliant for a young wife. She tried to divert her mind by reading,
profiting by the liberty of married women to read what they please. She
read the novels of Walter Scott, the poems of Lord Byron, the works
of Schiller and of Goethe, and much else of modern and also ancient
literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to draw. She
painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning ardently to
all those resources which women employ to bear the weariness of their
solitude. She gave herself that