Sleeping figures possess a sort of suavity, due to the absolute repose of both body and mind; but though that species of calmness softened but slightly the harsh expression of the count’s features, all illusion granted to the unhappy is so persuasive that the poor wife ended by finding hope in that tranquillity.  The roar of the tempest, now descending in torrents of rain, seemed to her no more than a melancholy moan; her fears and her pains both yielded her a momentary respite.  Contemplating the man to whom her life was bound, the countess allowed herself to float into a reverie, the sweetness of which was so intoxicating that she had no strength to break its charm.  For a moment, by one of those visions which in some way share the divine power, there passed before her rapid images of a happiness lost beyond recall.

Jeanne in her vision saw faintly, and as if in a distant gleam of dawn, the modest castle where her careless childhood had glided on; there were the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber, the scenes of her happy play.  She saw herself gathering flowers and planting them, unknowing why they wilted and would not grow, despite her constancy in watering them.  Next, she saw confusedly the vast town and the vast house blackened by age, to which her mother took her when she was seven years old.  Her lively memory showed her the old gray heads of the masters who taught and tormented her.  She remembered the person of her father; she saw him getting off his mule at the door of the manor-house, and taking her by the hand to lead her up the stairs; she recalled how her prattle drove from his brow the judicial cares he did not always lay aside with his black or his red robes, the white fur of which fell one day by chance under the snipping of her mischievous scissors.  She cast but one glance at the confessor of her aunt, the mother-superior of a convent of Poor Clares, a rigid and fanatical old man, whose duty it was to initiate her into the mysteries of religion.  Hardened by the severities necessary against heretics, the old priest never ceased to jangle the chains of hell; he told her of nothing but the vengeance of Heaven, and made her tremble with the assurance that God’s eye was on her.  Rendered timid, she dared not raise her eyes in the priest’s presence, and ceased to have any feeling but respect for her mother, whom up to that time she had made a sharer in all her frolics.  When she saw that beloved mother turning her blue eyes towards her with an appearance of anger, a religious terror took possession of the girl’s heart.

Then suddenly the vision took her to the second period of her childhood, when as yet she understood nothing of the things of life.  She thought with an almost mocking regret of the days when all her happiness was to work beside her mother in the tapestried salon, to pray in the church, to sing her ballads to a lute, to read in secret a romance of chivalry, to pluck the petals of a flower, discover what gift her father