“Where do you fish?” I asked, “if you can only do so from the banks you own?”

“Near Pont-de-Ruan,” she replied.  “Ah! we now own the river from Pont-de-Ruan to Clochegourde; Monsieur de Mortsauf has lately bought forty acres of the meadow lands with the savings of two years and the arrearage of his pension.  Does that surprise you?”

“Surprise me?” I cried; “I would that all the valley were yours.”  She answered me with a smile.  Presently we came below the bridge to a place where the Indre widens and where the fishing was going on.

“Well, Martineau?” she said.

“Ah, Madame la comtesse, such bad luck!  We have fished up from the mill the last three hours, and have taken nothing.”

We landed near them to watch the drawing in of the last net, and all three of us sat down in the shade of a “bouillard,” a sort of poplar with a white bark, which grows on the banks of the Danube and the Loire (probably on those of other large rivers), and sheds, in the spring of the year, a white and silky fluff, the covering of its flower.  The countess had recovered her august serenity; she half regretted the unveiling of her griefs, and mourned that she had cried aloud like Job, instead of weeping like the Magdalen,—­a Magdalen without loves, or galas, or prodigalities, but not without beauty and fragrance.  The net came in at her feet full of fish; tench, barbels, pike, perch, and an enormous carp, which floundered about on the grass.

“Madame brings luck!” exclaimed the keeper.

All the laborers opened their eyes as they looked with admiration at the woman whose fairy wand seemed to have touched the nets.  Just then the huntsman was seen urging his horse over the meadows at a full gallop.  Fear took possession of her.  Jacques was not with us, and the mother’s first thought, as Virgil so poetically says, is to press her children to her breast when danger threatens.

“Jacques!  Where is Jacques?  What has happened to my boy?”

She did not love me!  If she had loved me I should have seen upon her face when confronted with my sufferings that expression of a lioness in despair.

“Madame la comtesse, Monsieur le comte is worse.”

She breathed more freely and started to run towards Clochegourde, followed by me and by Madeleine.

“Follow me slowly,” she said, looking back; “don’t let the dear child overheat herself.  You see how it is; Monsieur de Mortsauf took that walk in the sun which put him into a perspiration, and sitting under the walnut-tree may be the cause of a great misfortune.”