But if I enjoyed the delightful benefits of naturalization in a family where I found relations after my own heart, I had also to pay some costs for it.  Until then Monsieur de Mortsauf had more or less restrained himself before me.  I had only seen his failings in the mass; I was now to see the full extent of their application and discover how nobly charitable the countess had been in the account she had given me of these daily struggles.  I learned now all the angles of her husband’s intolerable nature; I heard his perpetual scolding about nothing, complaints of evils of which not a sign existed; I saw the inward dissatisfaction which poisoned his life, and the incessant need of his tyrannical spirit for new victims.  When we went to walk in the evenings he selected the way; but whichever direction we took he was always bored; when we reached home he blamed others; his wife had insisted on going where she wanted; why was he governed by her in all the trifling things of life? was he to have no will, no thought of his own? must he consent to be a cipher in his own house?  If his harshness was to be received in patient silence he was angry because he felt a limit to his power; he asked sharply if religion did not require a wife to please her husband, and whether it was proper to despise the father of her children?  He always ended by touching some sensitive chord in his wife’s mind; and he seemed to find a domineering pleasure in making it sound.  Sometimes he tried gloomy silence and a morbid depression, which always alarmed his wife and made her pay him the most tender attentions.  Like petted children, who exercise their power without thinking of the distress of their mother, he would let her wait upon him as upon Jacques and Madeleine, of whom he was jealous.

I discovered at last that in small things as well as in great ones the count acted towards his servants, his children, his wife, precisely as he had acted to me about the backgammon.  The day when I understood, root and branch, these difficulties, which like a rampant overgrowth repressed the actions and stifled the breathing of the whole family, hindered the management of the household and retarded the improvement of the estate by complicating the most necessary acts, I felt an admiring awe which rose higher than my love and drove it back into my heart.  Good God! what was I?  Those tears that I had taken on my lips solemnized my spirit; I found happiness in wedding the sufferings of that woman.  Hitherto I had yielded to the count’s despotism as the smuggler pays his fine; henceforth I was a voluntary victim that I might come the nearer to her.  The countess understood me, allowed me a place beside her, and gave me permission to share her sorrows; like the repentant apostate, eager to rise to heaven with his brethren, I obtained the favor of dying in the arena.

“Were it not for you I must have succumbed under this life,” Henriette said to me one evening when the count had been, like the flies on a hot day, more stinging, venomous, and persistent than usual.