When she stepped out of the carriage, she glanced at the old building, and laughingly exclaimed: 

“It does not look cheerful!”

Her husband began to laugh in his turn, and replied: 

“Pooh! we get used to it!  You’ll see.  I never feel bored in it, for my part.”

That day they passed their time in embracing each other, and she did not find it too long.  This lasted fully a month.  The days passed one after the other in insignificant yet absorbing occupations.  She learned the value and the importance of the little things of life.  She knew that people can interest themselves in the price of eggs, which cost a few centimes more or less according to the seasons.

It was summer.  She went to the fields to see the men harvesting.  The brightness of the sunshine found an echo in her heart.

The autumn came.  Her husband went out shooting.  He started in the morning with his two dogs Medor and Mirza.  She remained alone, without grieving, moreover, at Henry’s absence.  She was very fond of him, but she did not miss him.  When he returned home, her affection was especially bestowed on the dogs.  She took care of them every evening with a mother’s tenderness, caressed them incessantly, gave them a thousand charming little names which she had no idea of applying to her husband.

He invariably told her all about his sport.  He described the places where he found partridges, expressed his astonishment at not having caught any hares in Joseph Ledentu’s clever, or else appeared indignant at the conduct of M. Lechapelier, of Havre, who always went along the edge of his property to shoot the game that he, Henry de Parville, had started.

She replied:  “Yes, indeed! it is not right,” thinking of something else all the while.

The winter came, the Norman winter, cold and rainy.  The endless floods of rain came down tin the slates of the great gabled roof, rising like a knife blade toward the sky.  The roads seemed like rivers of mud, the country a plain of mud, and no sound could be heard save that of water falling; no movement could be seen save the whirling flight of crows that settled down like a cloud on a field and then hurried off again.

About four o’clock, the army of dark, flying creatures came and perched in the tall beeches at the left of the chateau, emitting deafening cries.  During nearly an hour, they flew from tree top to tree top, seemed to be fighting, croaked, and made a black disturbance in the gray branches.  She gazed at them each evening with a weight at her heart, so deeply was she impressed by the lugubrious melancholy of the darkness falling on the deserted country.

Then she rang for the lamp, and drew near the fire.  She burned heaps of wood without succeeding in warming the spacious apartments reeking with humidity.  She was cold all day long, everywhere, in the drawing-room, at meals, in her own apartment.  It seemed to her she was cold to the marrow of her bones.  Her husband only came in to dinner; he was always out shooting, or else he was superintending sowing the seed, tilling the soil, and all the work of the country.