al spirit for new victims. When we went to walk in the evenings
he selected the way; but whichever direction we took he was always
bored; when we reached home he blamed others; his wife had insisted on
going where she wanted; why was he governed by her in all the trifling
things of life? was he to have no will, no thought of his own? must
he consent to be a cipher in his own house? If his harshness was to be
received in patient silence he was angry because he felt a limit to his
power; he asked sharply if religion did not require a wife to please
her husband, and whether it was proper to despise the father of her
children? He always ended by touching some sensitive chord in his wife's
mind; and he seemed to find a domineering pleasure in making it sound.
Sometimes he tried gloomy silence and a morbid depression, which always
alarmed his wife and made her pay him the most tender attentions.
Like petted children, who exercise their power without thinking of the
distress of their mother, he would let her wait upon him as upon Jacques
and Madeleine, of whom he was jealous.

I discovered at last that in small things as well as in great ones the
count acted towards his servants, his children, his wife, precisely as
he had acted to me about the backgammon. The day when I understood,
root and branch, these difficulties, which like a rampant overgrowth
repressed the actions and stifled the breathing of the whole family,
hindered the management of the household and retarded the improvement of
the estate by complicating the most necessary acts, I felt an admiring
awe which rose higher than my love and drove it back into my heart. Good
God! what was I? Those tears that I had taken on my lips solemnized
my spirit; I found happiness in wedding the sufferings of that woman.
Hitherto I had yielded to the count's despotism as the smuggler pays his
fine; henceforth I was a voluntary victim that I might come the nearer
to her. The countess understood me, allowed me a place beside her, and
gave me permission to share her sorrows; like the repentant apostate,
eager to rise to heaven with his brethren, I obtained the favor of dying
in the arena.

"Were it not for you I must have succumbed under this life," Henriette
said to me one evening when the count had been, like the flies on a hot
day, more stinging, venomous, and persistent than usual.

He had gone to bed. Henriette and I remained under the acacias; the
children were playing about u