He behaved in the same way in the management of the household, seeing the worst side of everything, and making himself, as his old coachman said, “the devil’s own advocate.”  The countess arranged that Jacques and Madeleine should take their meals alone at different hours from the family, so as to save them from the count’s outbursts and draw all the storms upon herself.  In this way the children now saw but little of their father.  By one of the hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons, the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused.  In the confidential communication he made to me on my arrival he particularly dwelt on his goodness to his family.  He wielded the flail, beat, bruised, and broke everything about him as a monkey might have done.  Then, having half-destroyed his prey, he denied having touched it.  I now understood the lines on Henriette’s forehead,—­fine lines, traced as it were with the edge of a razor, which I had noticed the moment I saw her.  There is a pudicity in noble minds which withholds them from speaking of their personal sufferings; proudly they hide the extent of their woes from hearts that love them, feeling a merciful joy in doing so.  Therefore in spite of my urgency, I did not immediately obtain the truth from Henriette.  She feared to grieve me; she made brief admissions, and then blushed for them; but I soon perceived myself the increase of trouble which the count’s present want of regular occupation had brought upon the household.

“Henriette,” I said, after I had been there some days, “don’t you think you have made a mistake in so arranging the estate that the count has no longer anything to do?”

“Dear,” she said, smiling, “my situation is critical enough to take all my attention; believe me, I have considered all my resources, and they are now exhausted.  It is true that the bickerings are getting worse and worse.  As Monsieur de Mortsauf and I are always together, I cannot lessen them by diverting his attention in other directions; in fact the pain would be the same to me in any case.  I did think of advising him to start a nursery for silk-worms at Clochegourde, where we have many mulberry-trees, remains of the old industry of Touraine.  But I reflected that he would still be the same tyrant at home, and I should have many more annoyances through the enterprise.  You will learn, my dear observer, that in youth a man’s ill qualities are restrained by society, checked in their swing by the play of passions, subdued under the fear of public opinion; later, a middle-aged man, living in solitude, shows his native defects, which are all the more terrible because so long repressed.  Human weaknesses are essentially base; they allow of neither peace nor truce; what you yield to them to-day they exact to-morrow, and always; they fasten on concessions and compel more of them.  Power, on the other hand, is merciful; it conforms to evidence, it is just and it is peaceable.  But the passions born of weakness are implacable.  Monsieur de Mortsauf takes an absolute pleasure in getting the better of me; and he who would deceive no one else, deceives me with delight.”