There are some women who, like the heroic Cure Merino, need but one hour’s sleep.  A nervous, irritable, subtle organization gives them a power for waking, without apparent fatigue, refused to most men.  And yet, when a strong emotion causes its corrosive waters to filtrate into the veins of these impressionable beings, it trickles there drop by drop, until it has hollowed out in the very depths of their hearts a lake full of trouble and storms.  Then, in the silence of night and the calm of solitude, insomnia makes the rosy cheeks grow pale and dark rings encircle the most sparkling eyes.  It is in vain for the burning forehead to seek the cool pillow; the pillow grows warm without the forehead cooling.  In vain the mind hunts for commonplace ideas, as a sort of intellectual poppy-leaves that may lead to a quiet night’s rest; a persistent thought still returns, chasing away all others, as an eagle disperses a flock of timid birds in order to remain sole master of its prey.  If one tries to repeat the accustomed prayer, and invoke the aid of the Virgin, or the good angel who watches at the foot of young girls’ beds, in order to keep away the charms of the tempter, the prayer is only on the lips, the Virgin is deaf, the angel sleeps!  The breath of passion against which one struggles runs through every fibre of the heart, like a storm over the chords of an Tolian harp, and extorts from it those magic melodies to which a poor, troubled, and frightened woman listens with remorse and despair; but to which she listens, and with which at last she is intoxicated, for the allegory of Eve is an immortal myth, that repeats itself, through every century and in every clime.

Since her entrance into society, Madame de Bergenheim had formed the habit of keeping late hours.  When the minute details of her toilette for the night were over, and she had confided her beautiful body to the snowy sheets of her couch, some new novel or fashionable magazine helped her wile away the time until sleep came to her.  Christian left his room, like a good country gentleman, at sunrise; he left it either for the chase—­or to oversee workmen, who were continually being employed upon some part of his domain.  Ordinarily, he returned only in time for dinner, and rarely saw Clemence except between that time and supper, at the conclusion of which, fatigued by his day’s work, he hastened to seek the repose of the just.  Husband and wife, while living under the same roof, were thus almost completely isolated from each other; night for one was day for the other.

By the haste with which Clemence shortened her preparations for the night, one would have said that she must have been blessed with an unusually sleepy sensation.  But when she lay in bed, with her head under her arm, like a swan with his neck under his wing, and almost in the attitude of Correggio’s Magdalen, her eyes, which sparkled with a feverish light, betrayed the fact that she had sought the solitude of her bed in order to indulge more freely in deep meditation.