foot. Innumerable draughts of air appeared to have taken up
their abode in the apartment, living, crafty currents of air as cruel
as enemies. She encountered them at every moment; they blew on her
incessantly their perfidious and frozen hatred, now on her face, now on
her hands, and now on her back.

Once more she spoke of a furnace; but her husband listened to her
request as if she were asking for the moon. The introduction of such an
apparatus at Parville appeared to him as impossible as the discovery of
the Philosopher's Stone.

Having been at Rouen on business one day, he brought back to his wife
a dainty foot warmer made of copper, which he laughingly called a
"portable furnace"; and he considered that this would prevent her
henceforth from ever being cold.

Toward the end of December she understood that she could not always live
like this, and she said timidly one evening at dinner:

"Listen, dear! Are we, not going to spend a week or two in Paris before
spring:"

He was stupefied.

"In Paris? In Paris? But what are we to do there? Ah! no by Jove! We are
better off here. What odd ideas come into your head sometimes."

She faltered:

"It might distract us a little."

He did not understand.

"What is it you want to distract you? Theatres, evening parties, dinners
in town? You knew, however, when you came here, that you ought not to
expect any distractions of this kind!"

She saw a reproach in these words, and in the tone in which they were
uttered. She relapsed into silence. She was timid and gentle, without
resisting power and without strength of will.

In January the cold weather returned with violence. Then the snow
covered the earth.

One evening, as she watched the great black cloud of crows dispersing
among the trees, she began to weep, in spite of herself.

Her husband came in. He asked in great surprise:

"What is the matter with you?"

He was happy, quite happy, never having dreamed of another life or
other pleasures. He had been born and had grown up in this melancholy
district. He felt contented in his own house, at ease in body and mind.

He did not understand that one might desire incidents, have a longing
for changing pleasures; he did not understand that it does not seem
natural to certain beings to remain in the same place during the four
seasons; he seemed not to know that spring, summer, autumn, and winter
have, for multitudes of persons, fresh amusements in new places.

Sh