“Poor Felix,” said the count, “she forbade me to write to you.  She knew how much you loved her.”

Though prepared to suffer, I found I had no strength to bear a scene which recalled my memories of past happiness.  “Ah!” I thought, “I see it still, that barren moor, dried like a skeleton, lit by a gray sky, in the centre of which grew a single flowering bush, which again and again I looked at with a shudder,—­the forecast of this mournful hour!”

All was gloom in the little castle, once so animated, so full of life.  The servants were weeping; despair and desolation everywhere.  The paths were not raked, work was begun and left undone, the workmen standing idly about the house.  Though the grapes were being gathered in the vineyard, not a sound reached us.  The place seemed uninhabited, so deep the silence!  We walked about like men whose grief rejects all ordinary topics, and we listened to the count, the only one of us who spoke.

After a few words prompted by the mechanical love he felt for his wife he was led by the natural bent of his mind to complain of her.  She had never, he said, taken care of herself or listened to him when he gave her good advice.  He had been the first to notice the symptoms of her illness, for he had studied them in his own case; he had fought them and cured them without other assistance than careful diet and the avoidance of all emotion.  He could have cured the countess, but a husband ought not to take so much responsibility upon himself, especially when he has the misfortune of finding his experience, in this as in everything, despised.  In spite of all he could say, the countess insisted on seeing Origet,—­Origet, who had managed his case so ill, was now killing his wife.  If this disease was, as they said, the result of excessive grief, surely he was the one who had been in a condition to have it.  What griefs could the countess have had?  She was always happy; she had never had troubles or annoyances.  Their fortune, thanks to his care and to his sound ideas, was now in a most satisfactory state; he had always allowed Madame de Mortsauf to reign at Clochegourde; her children, well trained and now in health, gave her no anxiety,—­where, then, did this grief they talked of come from?

Thus he argued and discussed the matter, mingling his expressions of despair with senseless accusations.  Then, recalled by some sudden memory to the admiration which he felt for his wife, tears rolled from his eyes which had been dry so long.

Madeleine came to tell me that her mother was ready.  The Abbe Birotteau followed me.  Madeleine, now a grave young girl, stayed with her father, saying that the countess desired to be alone with me, and also that the presence of too many persons would fatigue her.  The solemnity of this moment gave me that sense of inward heat and outward cold which overcomes us often in the great events of life.  The Abbe Birotteau, one of those men whom God marks for his own by investing them with sweetness and simplicity, together with patience and compassion, took me aside.