After the death of her aunt, Madame de Mortsauf received several visits at Clochegourde from Saint-Martin, a man of peace and of virtuous wisdom.  It was at Clochegourde that he corrected his last books, printed at Tours by Letourmy.  Madame de Verneuil, wise with the wisdom of an old woman who has known the stormy straits of life, gave Clochegourde to the young wife for her married home; and with the grace of old age, so perfect where it exists, the duchess yielded everything to her niece, reserving for herself only one room above the one she had always occupied, and which she now fitted up for the countess.  Her sudden death threw a gloom over the early days of the marriage, and connected Clochegourde with ideas of sadness in the sensitive mind of the bride.  The first period of her settlement in Touraine was to Madame de Mortsauf, I cannot say the happiest, but the least troubled of her life.

After the many trials of his exile, Monsieur de Mortsauf, taking comfort in the thought of a secure future, had a certain recovery of mind; he breathed anew in this sweet valley the intoxicating essence of revived hope.  Compelled to husband his means, he threw himself into agricultural pursuits and began to find some happiness in life.  But the birth of his first child, Jacques, was a thunderbolt which ruined both the past and the future.  The doctor declared the child had not vitality enough to live.  The count concealed this sentence from the mother; but he sought other advice, and received the same fatal answer, the truth of which was confirmed at the subsequent birth of Madeleine.  These events and a certain inward consciousness of the cause of this disaster increased the diseased tendencies of the man himself.  His name doomed to extinction, a pure and irreproachable young woman made miserable beside him and doomed to the anguish of maternity without its joys—­this uprising of his former into his present life, with its growth of new sufferings, crushed his spirit and completed its destruction.

The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.  Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an angel.  She became stoical.  Descending into an abyss, whence she still could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as the sister of charity devotes herself to many.  To reconcile him with himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness.  The count grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed.  Like all who have known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared betrayal; she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his mistrust.  With a woman’s tact she made him will to do that which was right, till he fancied the ideas were his own, and thus enjoyed in his own person the honors of a superiority that was never his.  After due experience of married life, she came to the resolution of never leaving