part I took in it, but for the likeness that
it bears to the destinies of so vast a number of women.

Everything at Clochegourde bore signs of a truly English cleanliness.
The room in which the countess received us was panelled throughout and
painted in two shades of gray. The mantelpiece was ornamented with a
clock inserted in a block of mahogany and surmounted with a tazza, and
two large vases of white porcelain with gold lines, which held bunches
of Cape heather. A lamp was on a pier-table, and a backgammon board on
legs before the fireplace. Two wide bands of cotton held back the white
cambric curtains, which had no fringe. The furniture was covered with
gray cotton bound with a green braid, and the tapestry on the countess's
frame told why the upholstery was thus covered. Such simplicity rose to
grandeur. No apartment, among all that I have seen since, has given me
such fertile, such teeming impressions as those that filled my mind
in that salon of Clochegourde, calm and composed as the life of its
mistress, where the conventual regularity of her occupations made itself
felt. The greater part of my ideas in science or politics, even the
boldest of them, were born in that room, as perfumes emanate from
flowers; there grew the mysterious plant that cast upon my soul its
fructifying pollen; there glowed the solar warmth which developed my
good and shrivelled my evil qualities. Through the windows the eye took
in the valley from the heights of Pont-de-Ruan to the chateau d'Azay,
following the windings of the further shore, picturesquely varied by the
towers of Frapesle, the church, the village, and the old manor-house of
Sache, whose venerable pile looked down upon the meadows.

In harmony with this reposeful life, and without other excitements to
emotion than those arising in the family, this scene conveyed to the
soul its own serenity. If I had met her there for the first time,
between the count and her two children, instead of seeing her
resplendent in a ball dress, I should not have ravished that delirious
kiss, which now filled me with remorse and with the fear of having lost
the future of my love. No; in the gloom of my unhappy life I should have
bent my knee and kissed the hem of her garment, wetting it with tears,
and then I might have flung myself into the Indre. But having breathed
the jasmine perfume of her skin and drunk the milk of that cup of love,
my soul had acquired the knowledge and the hope of human