ages of mournful fate, I am overpowered with disgust, invincible
disgust for life. What blow can I feel, to what affection can I answer,
when I see Jacques motionless on the terrace, scarcely a sign of life
about him, except in those dear eyes, large by emaciation, hollow as
those of an old man and, oh, fatal sign, full of precocious intelligence
contrasting with his physical debility. When I look at my pretty
Madeleine, once so gay, so caressing, so blooming, now white as death,
her very hair and eyes seem to me to have paled; she turns a languishing
look upon me as if bidding me farewell; nothing rouses her, nothing
tempts her. In spite of all my efforts I cannot amuse my children; they
smile at me, but their smile is only in answer to my endearments, it
does not come from them. They weep because they have no strength to play
with me. Suffering has enfeebled their whole being, it has loosened even
the ties that bound them to me.

"Thus you can well believe that Clochegourde is very sad. Monsieur de
Mortsauf now rules everything--Oh my friend! you, my glory!" she wrote,
farther on, "you must indeed love me well to love me still; to love me
callous, ungrateful, turned to stone by grief."

CHAPTER III. THE TWO WOMEN

It was at this time, when I was never more deeply moved in my whole
being, when I lived in that soul to which I strove to send the luminous
breeze of the mornings and the hope of the crimsoned evenings, that
I met, in the salons of the Elysee-Bourbon, one of those illustrious
ladies who reign as sovereigns in society. Immensely rich, born of a
family whose blood was pure from all misalliance since the Conquest,
married to one of the most distinguished old men of the British peerage,
it was nevertheless evident that these advantages were mere accessories
heightening this lady's beauty, graces, manners, and wit, all of which
had a brilliant quality which dazzled before it charmed. She was the
idol of the day; reigning the more securely over Parisian society
because she possessed the quality most necessary to success,--the hand
of iron in the velvet glove spoken of by Bernadotte.

You know the singular characteristics of English people, the distance
and coldness of their own Channel which they put between them and
whoever has not been presented to them in a proper manner. Humanity
seems to be an ant-hill on which they tread; they know none of their
species except the few they admit into their circle; t