Up to this moment Madeleine had listened with lowered eyes; now she stopped me by a gesture.

“Monsieur,” she said, in a voice trembling with emotion.  “I know all your thoughts; but I shall not change my feelings towards you.  I would rather fling myself into the Indre than ally myself to you.  I will not speak to you of myself, but if my mother’s name still possesses any power over you, in her name I beg you never to return to Clochegourde so long as I am in it.  The mere sight of you causes me a repugnance I cannot express, but which I shall never overcome.”

She bowed to me with dignity, and returned to the house without looking back, impassible as her mother had been for one day only, but more pitiless.  The searching eye of that young girl had discovered, though tardily, the secrets of her mother’s heart, and her hatred to the man whom she fancied fatal to her mother’s life may have been increased by a sense of her innocent complicity.

All before me was now chaos.  Madeleine hated me, without considering whether I was the cause or the victim of these misfortunes.  She might have hated us equally, her mother and me, had we been happy.  Thus it was that the edifice of my happiness fell in ruins.  I alone knew the life of that unknown, noble woman.  I alone had entered every region of her soul; neither mother, father, husband, nor children had ever known her.—­Strange truth!  I stir this heap of ashes and take pleasure in spreading them before you; all hearts may find something in them of their closest experience.  How many families have had their Henriette!  How many noble feelings have left this earth with no historian to fathom their hearts, to measure the depth and breadth of their spirits.  Such is human life in all its truth!  Often mothers know their children as little as their children know them.  So it is with husbands, lovers, brothers.  Did I imagine that one day, beside my father’s coffin, I should contend with my brother Charles, for whose advancement I had done so much?  Good God! how many lessons in the simplest history.

When Madeleine disappeared into the house, I went away with a broken heart.  Bidding farewell to my host at Sache, I started for Paris, following the right bank of the Indre, the one I had taken when I entered the valley for the first time.  Sadly I drove through the pretty village of Pont-de-Ruan.  Yet I was rich, political life courted me; I was not the weary plodder of 1814.  Then my heart was full of eager desires, now my eyes were full of tears; once my life was all before me to fill as I could, now I knew it to be a desert.  I was still young,—­only twenty-nine,—­but my heart was withered.  A few years had sufficed to despoil that landscape of its early glory, and to disgust me with life.  You can imagine my feelings when, on turning round, I saw Madeleine on the terrace.