She turned pale and said, lifting her eyes to heaven: 

“God’s will be done!”

“Do you know that the king said to your father, ’So that devil of a Mortsauf is still living’?”

“A jest on the lips of the king,” she said, “is a crime when repeated here.”

In spite of our precautions the count had tracked us; he now arrived, bathed in perspiration, and sat down under a walnut-tree where the countess had stopped to give me that rebuke.  I began to talk about the vintage; the count was silent, taking no notice of the dampness under the tree.  After a few insignificant remarks, interspersed with pauses that were very significant, he complained of nausea and headache; but he spoke gently, and did not appeal to our pity, or describe his sufferings in his usual exaggerated way.  We paid no attention to him.  When we reached the house, he said he felt worse and should go to bed; which he did, quite naturally and with much less complaint than usual.  We took advantage of the respite and went down to our dear terrace accompanied by Madeleine.

“Let us get that boat and go upon the river,” said the countess after we had made a few turns.  “We might go and look at the fishing which is going on to-day.”

We went out by the little gate, found the punt, jumped into it and were presently paddling up the Loire.  Like three children amused with trifles, we looked at the sedges along the banks and the blue and green dragon-flies; the countess wondered perhaps that she was able to enjoy such peaceful pleasures in the midst of her poignant griefs; but Nature’s calm, indifferent to our struggles, has a magic gift of consolation.  The tumults of a love full of restrained desires harmonize with the wash of the water; the flowers that the hand of man has never wilted are the voice of his secret dreams; the voluptuous swaying of the boat vaguely responds to the thoughts that are floating in his soul.  We felt the languid influence of this double poesy.  Words, tuned to the diapason of nature, disclosed mysterious graces; looks were impassioned rays sharing the light shed broadcast by the sun on the glowing meadows.  The river was a path along which we flew.  Our spirit, no longer kept down by the measured tread of our footsteps, took possession of the universe.  The abounding joy of a child at liberty, graceful in its motions, enticing in its play, is the living expression of two freed souls, delighting themselves by becoming ideally the wondrous being dreamed of by Plato and known to all whose youth has been filled with a blessed love.  To describe to you that hour, not in its indescribable details but in its essence, I must say to you that we loved each other in all the creations animate and inanimate which surrounded us; we felt without us the happiness our own hearts craved; it so penetrated our being that the countess took off her gloves and let her hands float in the water as if to cool an inward ardor.  Her eyes spoke; but her mouth, opening like a rose to the breeze, gave voice to no desire.  You know the harmony of deep tones mingling perfectly with high ones?  Ever, when I hear it now, it recalls to me the harmony of our two souls in this one hour, which never came again.