The first part of my stay, while I studied to understand the count, was a period of painful impressions to me.  I found him a man of extreme irascibility without adequate cause; hasty in action in hazardous cases to a degree that alarmed me.  Sometimes he showed glimpses of the brave gentleman of Conde’s army, parabolic flashes of will such as may, in times of emergency, tear through politics like bomb-shells, and may also, by virtue of honesty and courage, make a man condemned to live buried on his property an Elbee, a Bonchamp, or a Charette.  In presence of certain ideas his nostril contracted, his forehead cleared, and his eyes shot lightnings, which were soon quenched.  Sometimes I feared he might detect the language of my eyes and kill me.  I was young then and merely tender.  Will, that force that alters men so strangely, had scarcely dawned within me.  My passionate desires shook me with an emotion that was like the throes of fear.  Death I feared not, but I would not die until I knew the happiness of mutual love—­But how tell of what I felt!  I was a prey to perplexity; I hoped for some fortunate chance; I watched; I made the children love me; I tried to identify myself with the family.

Little by little the count restrained himself less in my presence.  I came to know his sudden outbreaks of temper, his deep and ceaseless melancholy, his flashes of brutality, his bitter, cutting complaints, his cold hatreds, his impulses of latent madness, his childish moans, his cries of a man’s despair, his unexpected fury.  The moral nature differs from the physical nature inasmuch as nothing is absolute in it.  The force of effects is in direct proportion to the characters or the ideas which are grouped around some fact.  My position at Clochegourde, my future life, depended on this one eccentric will.

I cannot describe to you the distress that filled my soul (as quick in those days to expand as to contract), whenever I entered Clochegourde, and asked myself, “How will he receive me?” With what anxiety of heart I saw the clouds collecting on that stormy brow.  I lived in a perpetual “qui-vive.”  I fell under the dominion of that man; and the sufferings I endured taught me to understand those of Madame de Mortsauf.  We began by exchanging looks of comprehension; tried by the same fire, how many discoveries I made during those first forty days! —­of actual bitterness, of tacit joys, of hopes alternately submerged and buoyant.  One evening I found her pensively watching a sunset which reddened the summits with so ravishing a glow that it was impossible not to listen to that voice of the eternal Song of Songs by which Nature herself bids all her creatures love.  Did the lost illusions of her girlhood return to her?  Did the woman suffer from an inward comparison?  I fancied I perceived a desolation in her attitude that was favorable to my first appeal, and I said, “Some days are hard to bear.”

“You read my soul,” she answered; “but how have you done so?”