An answer so peremptory closed the discussion, imprudently started by a seigneur from Lower Normandy.  The guests were silent, looking with a sort of terror at the pretty Comtesse d’Herouville.  All were convinced that if such an event occurred, her savage lord would execute his threat.

The words of the count echoed in the bosom of the young wife, then pregnant; one of those presentiments which furrow a track like lightning through the soul, told her that her child would be born at seven months.  An inward heat overflowed her from head to foot, sending the life’s blood to her heart with such violence that the surface of her body felt bathed in ice.  From that hour not a day had passed that the sense of secret terror did not check every impulse of her innocent gaiety.  The memory of the look, of the inflections of voice with which the count accompanied his words, still froze her blood, and silenced her sufferings, as she leaned over that sleeping head, and strove to see some sign of a pity she had vainly sought there when awake.

The child, threatened with death before its life began, made so vigorous a movement that she cried aloud, in a voice that seemed like a sigh, “Poor babe!”

She said no more; there are ideas that a mother cannot bear.  Incapable of reasoning at this moment, the countess was almost choked with the intensity of a suffering as yet unknown to her.  Two tears, escaping from her eyes, rolled slowly down her cheeks, and traced two shining lines, remaining suspended at the bottom of that white face, like dewdrops on a lily.  What learned man would take upon himself to say that the child unborn is on some neutral ground, where the emotions of its mother do not penetrate during those hours when soul clasps body and communicates its impressions, when thought permeates blood with healing balm or poisonous fluids?  The terror that shakes the tree, will it not hurt the fruit?  Those words, “Poor babe!” were they dictated by a vision of the future?  The shuddering of this mother was violent; her look piercing.

The bloody answer given by the count at the banquet was a link mysteriously connecting the past with this premature confinement.  That odious suspicion, thus publicly expressed, had cast into the memories of the countess a dread which echoed to the future.  Since that fatal gala, she had driven from her mind, with as much fear as another woman would have found pleasure in evoking them, a thousand scattered scenes of her past existence.  She refused even to think of the happy days when her heart was free to love.  Like as the melodies of their native land make exiles weep, so these memories revived sensations so delightful that her young conscience thought them crimes, and sued them to enforce still further the savage threat of the count.  There lay the secret of the horror which was now oppressing her soul.