gift of attraction was mysterious.  Instead of inspiring the gallant attentions which other women seek, she made men dream, letting them see her virginal nature of pure flame, her celestial visions, as we see the azure heavens through rifts in the clouds.  This involuntary revelation of her being made others thoughtful.  The rarity of her gestures, above all, the rarity of her glances—­for, excepting her children, she seldom looked at any one—­gave a strange solemnity to all she said and did when her words or actions seemed to her to compromise her dignity.

On this particular morning Madame de Mortsauf wore a rose-colored gown patterned in tiny stripes, a collar with a wide hem, a black belt, and little boots of the same hue.  Her hair was simply twisted round her head, and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb.  Such, my dear Natalie, is the imperfect sketch I promised you.  But the constant emanation of her soul upon her family, that nurturing essence shed in floods around her as the sun emits its light, her inward nature, her cheerfulness on days serene, her resignation on stormy ones,—­all those variations of expression by which character is displayed depend, like the effects in the sky, on unexpected and fugitive circumstances, which have no connection with each other except the background against which they rest, though all are necessarily mingled with the events of this history,—­truly a household epic, as great to the eyes of a wise man as a tragedy to the eyes of the crowd, an epic in which you will feel an interest, not only for the part I took in it, but for the likeness that it bears to the destinies of so vast a number of women.

Everything at Clochegourde bore signs of a truly English cleanliness.  The room in which the countess received us was panelled throughout and painted in two shades of gray.  The mantelpiece was ornamented with a clock inserted in a block of mahogany and surmounted with a tazza, and two large vases of white porcelain with gold lines, which held bunches of Cape heather.  A lamp was on a pier-table, and a backgammon board on legs before the fireplace.  Two wide bands of cotton held back the white cambric curtains, which had no fringe.  The furniture was covered with gray cotton bound with a green braid, and the tapestry on the countess’s frame told why the upholstery was thus covered.  Such simplicity rose to grandeur.  No apartment, among all that I have seen since, has given me such fertile, such teeming impressions as those that filled my mind in that salon of Clochegourde, calm and composed as the life of its mistress, where the conventual regularity of her occupations made itself felt.  The greater part of my ideas in science or politics, even the boldest of them, were born in that room, as perfumes emanate from flowers; there grew the mysterious plant that cast upon my soul its fructifying pollen; there glowed the solar warmth which developed my good and shrivelled my evil qualities.  Through the windows the eye took in the valley from the heights of Pont-de-Ruan to the chateau d’Azay, following the windings of the further shore, picturesquely varied by the towers of Frapesle, the church, the village, and the old manor-house of Sache, whose venerable pile looked down upon the meadows.