I liked to dance. But I had to renounce going to balls;
it made him suffer too much."

Countess Martin expressed astonishment. She had always imagined Marmet
as an old man, timid, and absorbed by his thoughts; a little ridiculous,
between his wife, plump, white, and amiable, and the skeleton wearing a
helmet of bronze and gold. But the excellent widow confided to her that,
at fifty-five years of age, when she was fifty-three, Louis was just as
jealous as on the first day of their marriage.

And Therese thought that Robert had never tormented her with jealousy.
Was it on his part a proof of tact and good taste, a mark of confidence,
or was it that he did not love her enough to make her suffer? She did
not know, and she did not have the heart to try to know. She would have
to look through recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open.

She murmured carelessly:

"We long to be loved, and when we are loved we are tormented or
worried."

The day was finished in reading and thinking. Choulette did not
reappear. Night covered little by little with its gray clouds the
mulberry-trees of the Dauphine. Madame Marmet went to sleep peacefully,
resting on herself as on a mass of pillows. Therese looked at her and
thought:

"She is happy, since she likes to remember."

The sadness of night penetrated her heart. And when the moon rose on
the fields of olive-trees, seeing the soft lines of plains and of hills
pass, Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and
oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the Seine, the Arc de
Triomphe with its radiating avenues, and the alleys of the park where,
at least, the trees and the stones knew her.

Suddenly Choulette threw himself into the carriage. Armed with his
knotty stick, his face and head enveloped in red wool and a fur cap,
he almost frightened her. It was what he wished to do. His violent
attitudes and his savage dress were studied. Always seeking to produce
effects, it pleased him to seem frightful.

He was a coward himself, and was glad to inspire the fears he often
felt. A moment before, as he was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while
seeing the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of those childish
frights that tormented his light mind. He had come near the Countess to
be reassured.

"Arles," he said. "Do you know Arles? It is a place of pure beauty. I
have seen, in the cloister, doves resting on the shoulders of statues,
and I have seen the l