e no worldly interests distracted my heart; no
ambitions blocked the stream of a love which flowed like a torrent,
bearing all things on its bosom. Later, we love the woman in a woman;
but the first woman we love is the whole of womanhood; her children are
ours, her interests are our interests, her sorrows our greatest sorrow;
we love her gown, the familiar things about her; we are more grieved by
a trifling loss of hers than if we knew we had lost everything. This
is the sacred love that makes us live in the being of another; whereas
later, alas! we draw another life into ours, and require a woman to
enrich our pauper spirit with her young soul.

I was now one of the household, and I knew for the first time an
infinite sweetness, which to a nature bruised as mine was like a bath
to a weary body; the soul is refreshed in every fibre, comforted to its
very depths. You will hardly understand me, for you are a woman, and
I am speaking now of a happiness women give but do not receive. A man
alone knows the choice happiness of being, in the midst of a strange
household, the privileged friend of its mistress, the secret centre
of her affections. No dog barks at you; the servants, like the dogs,
recognize your rights; the children (who are never misled, and know that
their power cannot be lessened, and that you cherish the light of their
life), the children possess the gift of divination, they play with you
like kittens and assume the friendly tyranny they show only to those
they love; they are full of intelligent discretion and come and go on
tiptoe without noise. Every one hastens to do you service; all like you,
and smile upon you. True passions are like beautiful flowers all the
more charming to the eye when they grow in a barren soil.

But if I enjoyed the delightful benefits of naturalization in a family
where I found relations after my own heart, I had also to pay some costs
for it. Until then Monsieur de Mortsauf had more or less restrained
himself before me. I had only seen his failings in the mass; I was
now to see the full extent of their application and discover how nobly
charitable the countess had been in the account she had given me of
these daily struggles. I learned now all the angles of her husband's
intolerable nature; I heard his perpetual scolding about nothing,
complaints of evils of which not a sign existed; I saw the inward
dissatisfaction which poisoned his life, and the incessant need of his
tyrannic