with the attentions paid to him, seemed almost young; his wife looked hopeful of a change; I amused myself with Madeleine, who, like all children with bodies weaker than their minds, made others laugh with her clever observations, full of sarcasm, though never malicious, and which spared no one.  It was a happy day.  A word, a hope awakened in the morning illumined nature.  Seeing me so joyous, Henriette was joyful too.

“This happiness smiling on my gray and cloudy life seems good,” she said to me the next day.

That day I naturally spent at Clochegourde.  I had been banished for five days, I was athirst for life.  The count left at six in the morning for Tours.  A serious disagreement had arisen between mother and daughter.  The duchess wanted the countess to move to Paris, where she promised her a place at court, and where the count, reconsidering his refusal, might obtain some high position.  Henriette, who was thought happy in her married life, would not reveal, even to her mother, her tragic sufferings and the fatal incapacity of her husband.  It was to hide his condition from the duchess that she persuaded him to go to Tours and transact business with his notaries.  I alone, as she had truly said, knew the dark secret of Clochegourde.  Having learned by experience how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely valley calmed the excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the diseased mind, and what beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had upon the health of her children, she opposed her mother’s desire that she should leave it with reasons which the overbearing woman, who was less grieved than mortified by her daughter’s bad marriage, vigorously combated.

Henriette saw that the duchess cared little for Jacques and Madeleine, —­a terrible discovery!  Like all domineering mothers who expect to continue the same authority over their married daughters that they maintained when they were girls, the duchess brooked no opposition; sometimes she affected a crafty sweetness to force her daughter to compliance, at other times a cold severity, intending to obtain by fear what gentleness had failed to win; then, when all means failed, she displayed the same native sarcasm which I had often observed in my own mother.  In those ten days Henriette passed through all the contentions a young woman must endure to establish her independence.  You, who for your happiness have the best of mothers, can scarcely comprehend such trials.  To gain a true idea of the struggle between that cold, calculating, ambitious woman and a daughter abounding in the tender natural kindness that never faileth, you must imagine a lily, to which my heart has always compared her, bruised beneath the polished wheels of a steel car.  That mother had nothing in common with her daughter; she was unable even to imagine the real difficulties which hindered her from taking advantage of the Restoration and forced her to continue a life of solitude.  Though families