At this period of my life I was only tender; will, which affects a man so strangely, was but just dawning in me. My vehement longing had given me a swiftly responsive sensitiveness that was like a thrill of fear. I did not tremble at the prospect of a struggle, but I did not want to die till I had known the happiness of reciprocated love. My difficulties and my desires grew in parallel lines.
How can I describe my feelings? I was a prey to heartrending perplexities. I hoped for a chance, I watched for it; I made friends with the children, and won them to love me; I tried to identify myself with the interests of the household.
By degrees the Count was less on his guard in my presence; then I learned to know his sudden changes of temper, his fits of utter, causeless dejection, his gusts of rebelliousness, his bitter and harsh complaining, his impulses of controlled madness, his childish whining, his groans as of a man in despair, his unexpected rages. Moral nature differs from physical nature, inasmuch as nothing in it is final. The intensity of effect is in proportion to the character acted on, or to the ideas that may be associated with an action. My continuing at Clochegourde, my whole future life depended on this fantastic will.
I could never express to you the anguish that weighed on my soul—as ready at that time to expand as to shrink—when on going in I said to myself, “How will he receive me?” What anxious fears crushed my heart when I descried a storm lowering on that snow-crowned brow! I was perpetually on the alert. Thus I was a slave to this man’s tyranny, and my own torments enabled me to understand those of Madame de Mortsauf.
We began to exchange glances of intelligence, and my tears would sometimes rise when she repressed hers. Thus the Countess and I tested each other through sorrow. I made many discoveries in the course of the first six weeks—forty days of real annoyance, of silent joys, of hopes now engulfed and now rising to the top.
One evening I found her piously meditative as she looked at a sunset, which crimsoned the heights with so voluptuous a blush, the valley spread below it like a bed, that it was impossible not to understand the voice of this eternal Song of Songs by which Nature bids her creatures love. Was the girl dreaming of illusions now flown? Was the woman feeling the pangs of some secret comparison? I fancied I saw in her languid attitude a favorable opening for a first avowal. I said to her:
“Some days are so hard to live through.”
“You have read my mind,” replied she. “But how?”
“We have so many points of contact,” said I. “Are we not both of the privileged few, keen to suffer and to enjoy—in whom every sensitive fibre thrills in unison to produce an echoing chord of feeling, and whose nervous system dwells in constant harmony with the first principle of things? Such beings, placed in a discordant medium, suffer torture, just as their enjoyment rises to ecstasy when they meet with ideas, sensations, or persons that they find sympathetic.
“And for us there is a third condition, of which the woes are known only to souls suffering from the same malady, and endowed with brotherly intelligence. We are capable of having impressions that are neither pleasure nor pain. Then an expressive instrument, gifted with life, is stirred in a void within us, is impassioned without an object, gives forth sounds without melody, utters words that die in the silence—a dreadful contradiction in souls that rebel against the uselessness of a vacuum; a terrible sport in which all our power is spent without nutrition, like blood from some internal wound. Our emotion flows in torrents, leaving us unutterably weak, in a speechless dejection for which the confessional has no ear.—Have I not expressed the sufferings we both are familiar with?”
She shivered, and still gazing at the sunset, she replied:
“How do you, who are so young, know these things? Were you once a woman?”
“Ah!” said I, with some agitation, “my childhood was like one long illness!”
“I hear Madeleine coughing,” said she, hastily leaving me.
The Countess had seen me constant in my attentions to her, without taking offence, for two reasons. In the first place, she was as pure as a child, and her thoughts never wandered to evil. And then I amused the Count; I was food for this lion without claws or mane. For I had hit on a pretext for my visits which was plausible to all. I could not play backgammon; Monsieur de Mortsauf offered to teach me, and I accepted.
At the moment when this bargain was made, the Countess could not help giving me a pitying look, as much as to say, “Well, you are rushing into the wolf’s jaws!”
If I had failed to understand this at first, by the third day I knew to what I had committed myself. My patience, which as a result of my child-life is inexhaustible,
