A word from his wife was enough to console me, and it frequently recalled him to a sense of politeness and good-breeding.  But before long I fell into the furnace of an unexpected misery.  My money was disappearing under these losses.  Though the count was always present during my visits until I left the house, which was sometimes very late, I cherished the hope of finding some moment when I might say a word that would reach my idol’s heart; but to obtain that moment, for which I watched and waited with a hunter’s painful patience, I was forced to continue these weary games, during which my feelings were lacerated and my money lost.  Still, there were moments when we were silent, she and I, looking at the sunlight on the meadows, the clouds in a gray sky, the misty hills, or the quivering of the moon on the sandbanks of the river; saying only, “Night is beautiful!”

“Night is woman, madame.”

“What tranquillity!”

“Yes, no one can be absolutely wretched here.”

Then she would return to her embroidery frame.  I came at last to hear the inward beatings of an affection which sought its object.  But the fact remained—­without money, farewell to these evenings.  I wrote to my mother to send me some.  She scolded me and sent only enough to last a week.  Where could I get more?  My life depended on it.  Thus it happened that in the dawn of my first great happiness I found the same sufferings that assailed me elsewhere; but in Paris, at college, at school I evaded them by abstinence; there my privations were negative, at Frapesle they were active; so active that I was possessed by the impulse to theft, by visions of crime, furious desperations which rend the soul and must be subdued under pain of losing our self-respect.  The memory of what I suffered through my mother’s parsimony taught me that indulgence for young men which one who has stood upon the brink of the abyss and measured its depths, without falling into them, must inevitably feel.  Though my own rectitude was strengthened by those moments when life opened and let me see the rocks and quicksands beneath the surface, I have never known that terrible thing called human justice draw its blade through the throat of a criminal without saying to myself:  “Penal laws are made by men who have never known misery.”

At this crisis I happened to find a treatise on backgammon in Monsieur de Chessel’s library, and I studied it.  My host was kind enough to give me a few lessons; less harshly taught by the count I made good progress and applied the rules and calculations I knew by heart.  Within a few days I was able to beat Monsieur de Mortsauf; but no sooner had I done so and won his money for the first time than his temper became intolerable; his eyes glittered like those of tigers, his face shrivelled, his brows knit as I never saw brows knit before or since.  His complainings were those of a fretful child.  Sometimes he flung down the dice, quivered with rage, bit the dice-box,