and said insulting things to me.  Such violence, however, came to an end.  When I had acquired enough mastery of the game I played it to suit me; I so managed that we were nearly equal up to the last moment; I allowed him to win the first half and made matters even during the last half.  The end of the world would have surprised him less than the rapid superiority of his pupil; but he never admitted it.  The unvarying result of our games was a topic of discourse on which he fastened.

“My poor head,” he would say, “is fatigued; you manage to win the last of the game because by that time I lose my skill.”

The countess, who knew backgammon, understood my manoeuvres from the first, and gave me those mute thanks which swell the heart of a young man; she granted me the same look she gave to her children.  From that ever-blessed evening she always looked at me when she spoke.  I cannot explain to you the condition I was in when I left her.  My soul had annihilated my body; it weighed nothing; I did not walk, I flew.  That look I carried within me; it bathed me with light just as her last words, “Adieu, monsieur,” still sounded in my soul with the harmonies of “O filii, o filioe” in the paschal choir.  I was born into a new life, I was something to her!  I slept on purple and fine linen.  Flames darted before my closed eyelids, chasing each other in the darkness like threads of fire in the ashes of burned paper.  In my dreams her voice became, though I cannot describe it, palpable, an atmosphere of light and fragrance wrapping me, a melody enfolding my spirit.  On the morrow her greeting expressed the fulness of feelings that remained unuttered, and from that moment I was initiated into the secrets of her voice.

That day was to be one of the most decisive of my life.  After dinner we walked on the heights across a barren plain where no herbage grew; the ground was stony, arid, and without vegetable soil of any kind; nevertheless a few scrub oaks and thorny bushes straggled there, and in place of grass, a carpet of crimped mosses, illuminated by the setting sun and so dry that our feet slipped upon it.  I held Madeleine by the hand to keep her up.  Madame de Mortsauf was leading Jacques.  The count, who was in front, suddenly turned round and striking the earth with his cane said to me in a dreadful tone:  “Such is my life! —­but before I knew you,” he added with a look of penitence at his wife.  The reparation was tardy, for the countess had turned pale; what woman would not have staggered as she did under the blow?

“But what delightful scenes are wafted here, and what a view of the sunset!” I cried.  “For my part I should like to own this barren moor; I fancy there may be treasures if we dig for them.  But its greatest wealth is that of being near you.  Who would not pay a great cost for such a view?—­all harmony to the eye, with that winding river where the soul may bathe among the ash-trees and the alders.  See the difference of taste!  To you this spot of earth is a barren waste; to me, it is paradise.”