Henriette was silent.  To stop the conversation, in which I feared my young blood might take fire, I answered in monosyllables, mostly acquiescent, avoiding discussion; but Monsieur de Mortsauf had too much sense not to perceive the meaning of my politeness.  Presently he was angry at being always in the right; he grew refractory, his eyebrows and the wrinkles of his forehead worked, his yellow eyes blazed, his rufous nose grew redder, as it did on the day I first witnessed an attack of madness.  Henriette gave me a supplicating look, making me understand that she could not employ on my behalf an authority to which she had recourse to protect her children.  I at once answered the count seriously, taking up the political question, and managing his peevish spirit with the utmost care.

“Poor dear! poor dear!” she murmured two or three times; the words reaching my ear like a gentle breeze.  When she could intervene with success she said, interrupting us, “Let me tell you, gentlemen, that you are very dull company.”

Recalled by this conversation to his chivalrous sense of what was due to a woman, the count ceased to talk politics, and as we bored him in our turn by commonplace matters, he presently left us to continue our walk, declaring that it made his head spin to go round and round on the same path.

My sad conjectures were true.  The soft landscape, the warm atmosphere, the cloudless skies, the soothing poetry of this valley, which for fifteen years had calmed the stinging fancies of that diseased mind, were now impotent.  At a period of life when the asperities of other men are softened and their angles smoothed, the disposition of this man became more and more aggressive.  For the last few months he had taken a habit of contradicting for the sake of contradiction, without reason, without even trying to justify his opinions; he insisted on knowing the why and the wherefore of everything; grew restless under a delay or an omission; meddled with every item of the household affairs, and compelled his wife and the servants to render him the most minute and fatiguing account of all that was done; never allowing them the slightest freedom of action.  Formerly he did not lose his temper except for some special reason; now his irritation was constant.  Perhaps the care of his farms, the interests of agriculture, an active out-door life had formerly soothed his atrabilious temper by giving it a field for its uneasiness, and by furnishing employment for his activity.  Possibly the loss of such occupation had allowed his malady to prey upon itself; no longer exercised on matters without, it was showing itself in more fixed ideas; the moral being was laying hold of the physical being.  He had lately become his own doctor; he studied medical books, fancied he had the diseases he read of, and took the most extraordinary and unheard of precautions about his health,—­precautions never the same, impossible to foresee, and consequently impossible