The dinner passed with inward happiness on my part.  Feeling that I was there, under her roof, I gave no heed to her obvious coldness, nor to the count’s indifference masked by his politeness.  Love, like life, has an adolescence during which period it suffices unto itself.  I made several stupid replies induced by the tumults of passion, but no one perceived their cause, not even she, who knew nothing of love.  The rest of my visit was a dream, a dream which did not cease until by moonlight on that warm and balmy night I recrossed the Indre, watching the white visions that embellished meadows, shores, and hills, and listening to the clear song, the matchless note, full of deep melancholy and uttered only in still weather, of a tree-frog whose scientific name is unknown to me.  Since that solemn evening I have never heard it without infinite delight.  A sense came to me then of the marble wall against which my feelings had hitherto dashed themselves.  Would it be always so?  I fancied myself under some fatal spell; the unhappy events of my past life rose up and struggled with the purely personal pleasure I had just enjoyed.  Before reaching Frapesle I turned to look at Clochegourde and saw beneath its windows a little boat, called in Touraine a punt, fastened to an ash-tree and swaying on the water.  This punt belonged to Monsieur de Mortsauf, who used it for fishing.

“Well,” said Monsieur de Chessel, when we were out of ear-shot.  “I needn’t ask if you found those shoulders; I must, however, congratulate you on the reception Monsieur de Mortsauf gave you.  The devil! you stepped into his heart at once.”

These words followed by those I have already quoted to you raised my spirits.  I had not as yet said a word, and Monsieur de Chessel may have attributed my silence to happiness.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“He never, to my knowledge, received any one so well.”

“I will admit that I am rather surprised myself,” I said, conscious of a certain bitterness underlying my companion’s speech.

Though I was too inexpert in social matters to understand its cause, I was much struck by the feeling Monsieur de Chessel betrayed.  His real name was Durand, but he had had the weakness to discard the name of a worthy father, a merchant who had made a large fortune under the Revolution.  His wife was sole heiress of the Chessels, an old parliamentary family under Henry IV., belonging to the middle classes, as did most of the Parisian magistrates.  Ambitious of higher flights Monsieur de Chessel endeavored to smother the original Durand.  He first called himself Durand de Chessel, then D. de Chessel, and that made him Monsieur de Chessel.  Under the Restoration he entailed an estate with the title of count in virtue of letters-patent from Louis XVIII.  His children reaped the fruits of his audacity without knowing what it cost him in sarcastic comments.  Parvenus are like monkeys, whose cleverness they possess; we