es,
just as history reveals to us that the reigns of the kings and queens
who are portrayed as kneeling with clasped hands in the windows of
churches, were stained by oppression and bloodshed. I had taken note of
the fact that, apart from her own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity
inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance
separating the sufferers from herself. The tears which flowed from her
in torrents when she read of the misfortunes of persons unknown to her,
in a newspaper, were quickly stemmed once she had been able to form a
more accurate mental picture of the victims. One night, shortly after
her confinement, the kitchen-maid was seized with the most appalling
pains; Mamma heard her groans, and rose and awakened Francoise, who,
quite unmoved, declared that all the outcry was mere malingering, that
the girl wanted to 'play the mistress' in the house. The doctor, who
had been afraid of some such attack, had left a marker in a medical
dictionary which we had, at the page on which the symptoms were
described, and had told us to turn up this passage, where we would find
the measures of 'first aid' to be adopted. My mother sent Francoise
to fetch the book, warning her not to let the marker drop out. An hour
elapsed, and Francoise had not returned; my mother, supposing that
she had gone back to bed, grew vexed, and told me to go myself to the
bookcase and fetch the volume. I did so, and there found Francoise who,
in her curiosity to know what the marker indicated, had begun to read
the clinical account of these after-pains, and was violently sobbing,
now that it was a question of a type of illness with which she was not
familiar. At each painful symptom mentioned by the writer she would
exclaim: "Oh, oh, Holy Virgin, is it possible that God wishes any
wretched human creature to suffer so? Oh, the poor girl!"

But when I had called her, and she had returned to the bedside of
Giotto's Charity, her tears at once ceased to flow; she could find no
stimulus for that pleasant sensation of tenderness and pity which she
very well knew, having been moved to it often enough by the perusal
of newspapers; nor any other pleasure of the same kind in her sense of
weariness and irritation at being pulled out of bed in the middle of
the night for the kitchen-maid; so that at the sight of those very
sufferings, the printed account of which had moved her to tears, she
had nothing to offer but ill-tempered mut