She thanked me with a look.

“Bucolics!” exclaimed the count, with a bitter look.  “This is no life for a man who bears your name.”  Then he suddenly changed his tone —­“The bells!” he cried, “don’t you hear the bells of Azay?  I hear them ringing.”

Madame de Mortsauf gave me a frightened look.  Madeleine clung to my hand.

“Suppose we play a game of backgammon?” I said.  “Let us go back; the rattle of the dice will drown the sound of the bells.”

We returned to Clochegourde, conversing by fits and starts.  Once in the salon an indefinable uncertainty and dread took possession of us.  The count flung himself into an armchair, absorbed in reverie, which his wife, who knew the symptoms of his malady and could foresee an outbreak, was careful not to interrupt.  I also kept silence.  As she gave me no hint to leave, perhaps she thought backgammon might divert the count’s mind and quiet those fatal nervous susceptibilities, the excitements of which were killing him.  Nothing was ever harder than to make him play that game, which, however, he had a great desire to play.  Like a pretty woman, he always required to be coaxed, entreated, forced, so that he might not seem the obliged person.  If by chance, being interested in the conversation, I forgot to propose it, he grew sulky, bitter, insulting, and spoiled the talk by contradicting everything.  If, warned by his ill-humor, I suggested a game, he would dally and demur.  “In the first place, it is too late,” he would say; “besides, I don’t care for it.”  Then followed a series of affectations like those of women, which often leave you in ignorance of their real wishes.

On this occasion I pretended a wild gaiety to induce him to play.  He complained of giddiness which hindered him from calculating; his brain, he said, was squeezed into a vice; he heard noises, he was choking; and thereupon he sighed heavily.  At last, however, he consented to the game.  Madame de Mortsauf left us to put the children to bed and lead the household in family prayers.  All went well during her absence; I allowed Monsieur de Mortsauf to win, and his delight seemed to put him beside himself.  This sudden change from a gloom that led him to make the darkest predictions to the wild joy of a drunken man, expressed in a crazy laugh and without any adequate motive, distressed and alarmed me.  I had never seen him in quite so marked a paroxysm.  Our intimacy had borne fruits in the fact that he no longer restrained himself before me.  Day by day he had endeavored to bring me under his tyranny, and obtain fresh food, as it were, for his evil temper; for it really seems as though moral diseases were creatures with appetites and instincts, seeking to enlarge the boundaries of their empire as a landowner seeks to increase his domain.