lost happiness. Why do the names of the two estates purchased
after the Restoration, and in which Monsieur and Madame de Mortsauf both
took the deepest interest, the Cassine and the Rhetoriere, move me more
than the sacred names of the Holy Land or of Greece? "Who loves, knows!"
cried La Fontaine. Those names possess the talismanic power of words
uttered under certain constellations by seers; they explain magic to me;
they awaken sleeping forms which arise and speak to me; they lead me to
the happy valley; they recreate skies and landscape. But such evocations
are in the regions of the spiritual world; they pass in the silence of
my own soul. Be not surprised, therefore, if I dwell on all these homely
scenes; the smallest details of that simple, almost common life are
ties which, frail as they may seem, bound me in closest union to the
countess.

The interests of her children gave Madame de Mortsauf almost as much
anxiety as their health. I soon saw the truth of what she had told me as
to her secret share in the management of the family affairs, into which
I became slowly initiated. After ten years' steady effort Madame de
Mortsauf had changed the method of cultivating the estate. She had "put
it in fours," as the saying is in those parts, meaning the new system
under which wheat is sown every four years only, so as to make the soil
produce a different crop yearly. To evade the obstinate unwillingness of
the peasantry it was found necessary to cancel the old leases and give
new ones, to divide the estate into four great farms and let them
on equal shares, the sort of lease that prevails in Touraine and its
neighborhood. The owner of the estate gives the house, farm-buildings,
and seed-grain to tenants-at-will, with whom he divides the costs of
cultivation and the crops. This division is superintended by an agent or
bailiff, whose business it is to take the share belonging to the owner;
a costly system, complicated by the market changes of values, which
alter the character of the shares constantly. The countess had induced
Monsieur de Mortsauf to cultivate a fifth farm, made up of the reserved
lands about Clochegourde, as much to occupy his mind as to show other
farmers the excellence of the new method by the evidence of facts. Being
thus, in a hidden way, the mistress of the estate, she had slowly
and with a woman's persistency rebuilt two of the farm-houses on the
principle of those in Artois and Flanders. It is easy t