tact and good taste, a mark of confidence,
or was it that he did not love her enough to make her suffer? She did not
know, and she did not have the heart to try to know. She would have to
look through recesses of her mind which she preferred not to open.

She murmured carelessly:

"We long to be loved, and when we are loved we are tormented or worried."

The day was finished in reading and thinking. Choulette did not reappear.
Night covered little by little with its gray clouds the mulberry-trees of
the Dauphine. Madame Marmet went to sleep peacefully, resting on herself
as on a mass of pillows. Therese looked at her and thought:

"She is happy, since she likes to remember."

The sadness of night penetrated her heart. And when the moon rose on the
fields of olive-trees, seeing the soft lines of plains and of hills pass,
Therese, in this landscape wherein everything spoke of peace and
oblivion, and nothing spoke of her, regretted the Seine, the Arc de
Triomphe with its radiating avenues, and the alleys of the park where, at
least, the trees and the stones knew her.

Suddenly Choulette threw himself into the carriage. Armed with his knotty
stick, his face and head enveloped in red wool and a fur cap, he almost
frightened her. It was what he wished to do. His violent attitudes and
his savage dress were studied. Always seeking to produce effects, it
pleased him to seem frightful.

He was a coward himself, and was glad to inspire the fears he often felt.
A moment before, as he was smoking his pipe, he had felt, while seeing
the moon swallowed up by the clouds, one of those childish frights that
tormented his light mind. He had come near the Countess to be reassured.

"Arles," he said. "Do you know Arles? It is a place of pure beauty. I
have seen, in the cloister, doves resting on the shoulders of statues,
and I have seen the little gray lizards warming themselves in the sun on
the tombs. The tombs are now in two rows on the road that leads to the
church. They are formed like cisterns, and serve as beds for the poor at
night. One night, when I was walking among them, I met a good old woman
who was placing dried herbs in the tomb of an old maid who had died on
her wedding-day. We said goodnight to her. She replied: 'May God
hear-you! but fate wills that this tomb should open on the side of the
northwest wind. If only it were open on the other side, I should be lying
as comfortably as Queen Jeanne.'"

Therese made no a