He would come back jovial, and covered with mud, rubbing his hands as he exclaimed: 

“What wretched weather!”

Or else: 

“A fire looks comfortable!”

Or sometimes: 

“Well, how are you to-day?  Are you in good spirits?”

He was happy, in good health, without desires, thinking of nothing save this simple, healthy, and quiet life.

About December, when the snow had come, she suffered so much from the icy-cold air of the chateau which seemed to have become chilled in passing through the centuries just as human beings become chilled with years, that she asked her husband one evening: 

“Look here, Henry!  You ought to have a furnace put into the house; it would dry the walls.  I assure you that I cannot keep warm from morning till night.”

At first he was stunned at this extravagant idea of introducing a furnace into his manor-house.  It would have seemed more natural to him to have his dogs fed out of silver dishes.  He gave a tremendous laugh from the bottom of his chest as he exclaimed: 

“A furnace here!  A furnace here!  Ha! ha! ha! what a good joke!”

She persisted: 

“I assure you, dear, I feel frozen; you don’t feel it because you are always moving about; but all the same, I feel frozen.”

He replied, still laughing: 

“Pooh! you’ll get used to it, and besides it is excellent for the health.  You will only be all the better for it.  We are not Parisians, damn it! to live in hot-houses.  And, besides, the spring is quite near.”

About the beginning of January, a great misfortune befell her.  Her father and mother died in a carriage accident.  She came to Paris for the funeral.  And her sorrow took entire possession of her mind for about six months.

The mildness of the beautiful summer days finally roused her, and she lived along in a state of sad languor until autumn.

When the cold weather returned, she was brought face to face, for the first time, with the gloomy future.  What was she to do?  Nothing.  What was going to happen to her henceforth?  Nothing.  What expectation, what hope, could revive her heart?  None.  A doctor who was consulted declared that she would never have children.

Sharper, more penetrating still than the year before, the cold made her suffer continually.

She stretched out her shivering hands to the big flames.  The glaring fire burned her face; but icy whiffs seemed to glide down her back and to penetrate between her skin and her underclothing.  And she shivered from head to foot.  Innumerable draughts of air appeared to have taken up their abode in the apartment, living, crafty currents of air as cruel as enemies.  She encountered them at every moment; they blew on her incessantly their perfidious and frozen hatred, now on her face, now on her hands, and now on her back.

Once more she spoke of a furnace; but her husband listened to her request as if she were asking for the moon.  The introduction of such an apparatus at Parville appeared to him as impossible as the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone.