As for writing long letters nowadays, how can I. This one, in which I want to describe to you the daily routine of my life, will be a week on the stocks.  Who can tell but Armand may lay hold of it to make caps for his regiments drawn up on my carpet, or vessels for the fleets which sail his bath!  A single day will serve as a sample of the rest, for they are all exactly alike, and their characteristics reduce themselves to two—­either the children are well, or they are not.  For me, in this solitary grange, it is no exaggeration to say that hours become minutes, or minutes hours, according to the children’s health.

If I have some delightful hours, it is when they are asleep and I am no longer needed to rock the one or soothe the other with stories.  When I have them sleeping by my side, I say to myself, “Nothing can go wrong now.”  The fact is, my sweet, every mother spends her time, so soon as her children are out of her sight, in imagining dangers for them.  Perhaps it is Armand seizing the razors to play with, or his coat taking fire, or a snake biting him, or he might tumble in running and start an abscess on his head, or he might drown himself in a pond.  A mother’s life, you see, is one long succession of dramas, now soft and tender, now terrible.  Not an hour but has its joys and fears.

But at night, in my room, comes the hour for waking dreams, when I plan out their future, which shines brightly in the smile of the guardian angel, watching over their beds.  Sometimes Armand calls me in his sleep; I kiss his forehead (without rousing him), then his sister’s feet, and watch them both lying in their beauty.  These are my merry-makings!  Yesterday, it must have been our guardian angel who roused me in the middle of the night and summoned me in fear to Athenais’ cradle.  Her head was too low, and I found Armand all uncovered, his feet purple with cold.

“Darling mother!” he cried, rousing up and flinging his arms round me.

There, dear, is one of our night scenes for you.

How important it is for a mother to have her children by her side at night!  It is not for a nurse, however careful she may be, to take them up, comfort them, and hush them to sleep again, when some horrid nightmare has disturbed them.  For they have their dreams, and the task of explaining away one of those dread visions of the night is the more arduous because the child is scared, stupid, and only half awake.  It is a mere interlude in the unconsciousness of slumber.  In this way I have come to sleep so lightly, that I can see my little pair and see them stirring, through the veil of my eyelids.  A sigh or a rustle wakens me.  For me, the demon of convulsions is ever crouching by their beds.