At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen.  Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.  She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes.  But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.

Spring came round.  With the first warm weather, when the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from dyspnoea.

From the beginning of July she counted how many weeks there were to October, thinking that perhaps the Marquis d’Andervilliers would give another ball at Vaubyessard.  But all September passed without letters or visits.

After the ennui of this disappointment her heart once more remained empty, and then the same series of days recommenced.  So now they would thus follow one another, always the same, immovable, and bringing nothing.  Other lives, however flat, had at least the chance of some event.  One adventure sometimes brought with it infinite consequences and the scene changed.  But nothing happened to her; God had willed it so!  The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut fast.

She gave up music.  What was the good of playing?  Who would hear her?  Since she could never, in a velvet gown with short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of ecstasy envelop her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself with practicing.  Her drawing cardboard and her embroidery she left in the cupboard.  What was the good?  What was the good?  Sewing irritated her.  “I have read everything,” she said to herself.  And she sat there making the tongs red-hot, or looked at the rain falling.

How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded!  She listened with dull attention to each stroke of the cracked bell.  A cat slowly walking over some roof put up his back in the pale rays of the sum.  The wind on the highroad blew up clouds of dust.  Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that died away over the fields.

But the people came out from church.  The women in waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare-headed children skipping along in front of them, all were going home.  And till nightfall, five or six men, always the same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of the inn.

The winter was severe.  The windows every morning were covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the whole day long.  At four o’clock the lamp had to be lighted.