base.  All the pleasures of girlhood, even her fete days, were dearly purchased, for she was scolded for her gaiety as much as for her faults.  No teaching and no training for her position had been given in love, always with sarcastic irony.  She was not angry against her mother; in fact she blamed herself for feeling more terror than love for her.  “Perhaps,” she said, dear angel, “these severities were needful; they had certainly prepared her for her present life.”  As I listened it seemed to me that the harp of Job, from which I had drawn such savage sounds, now touched by the Christian fingers gave forth the litanies of the Virgin at the foot of the cross.

“We lived in the same sphere before we met in this,” I said; “you coming from the east, I from the west.”

She shook her head with a gesture of despair.

“To you the east, to me the west,” she replied.  “You will live happy, I must die of pain.  Life is what we make of it, and mine is made forever.  No power can break the heavy chain to which a woman is fastened by this ring of gold—­the emblem of a wife’s purity.”

We knew we were twins of one womb; she never dreamed of a half-confidence between brothers of the same blood.  After a short sigh, natural to pure hearts when they first open to each other, she told me of her first married life, her deceptions and disillusions, the rebirth of her childhood’s misery.  Like me, she had suffered under trifles; mighty to souls whose limpid substance quivers to the least shock, as a lake quivers on the surface and to its utmost depths when a stone is flung into it.  When she married she possessed some girlish savings; a little gold, the fruit of happy hours and repressed fancies.  These, in a moment when they were needed, she gave to her husband, not telling him they were gifts and savings of her own.  He took no account of them, and never regarded himself her debtor.  She did not even obtain the glance of thanks that would have paid for all.  Ah! how she went from trial to trial!  Monsieur de Mortsauf habitually neglected to give her money for the household.  When, after a struggle with her timidity, she asked him for it, he seemed surprised and never once spared her the mortification of petitioning for necessities.  What terror filled her mind when the real nature of the ruined man’s disease was revealed to her, and she quailed under the first outbreak of his mad anger!  What bitter reflections she had made before she brought herself to admit that her husband was a wreck!  What horrible calamities had come of her bearing children!  What anguish she felt at the sight of those infants born almost dead!  With what courage had she said in her heart:  “I will breathe the breath of life into them; I will bear them anew day by day!” Then conceive the bitterness of finding her greatest obstacle in the heart and hand from which a wife should draw her greatest succor!  She saw the untold disaster that threatened him.  As each difficulty was conquered, new deserts opened before her, until the day when she thoroughly understood her husband’s condition, the constitution of her children, and the character of the neighborhood in which she lived; a day when (like the child taken by Napoleon from a tender home) she taught her feet to trample through mud and snow, she trained her nerves to bullets and all her being to the passive obedience of a soldier.