She looked at her daughter with surprise; she had believed that in order to keep me at her side the Countess had snuffed out all my ambition.
The time while the Duchesse de Lenoncourt stayed at Clochegourde was one of general discomfort. The Countess besought me to be strictly formal; she was frightened at a word spoken low; to please her I was obliged to saddle myself with dissimulation.
The great Thursday came; it was a festival of tiresome formality, one of those days which lovers hate, when they are used to the facilities of everyday life, accustomed to find their place ready for them, and the mistress of the house wholly theirs. Love has a horror of everything but itself.
The Duchess returned to enjoy the pomps of the Court, and all fell into order at Clochegourde.
My little skirmish with the. Count had resulted in my being more firmly rooted in the house than before; I could come in at any time without giving rise to the slightest remark, and my previous life led me to spread myself like a climbing plant in the beautiful soul which opened to me the enchanted world of sympathetic feeling. From hour to hour, from minute to minute, our brotherly union, based on perfect confidence, became more intimate; we were confirmed in our relative positions: the Countess wrapped me in her cherishing affection, in the white purity of motherly love; while my passion, seraphic in her presence, when I was absent from her grew fierce and thirsty, like red-hot iron. Thus I loved her with a twofold love, which by turns pierced me with the myriad darts of desire, and then lost them in the sky, where they vanished in the unfathomable ether.
If you ask me why young as I was, and full of vehement craving, I was satisfied to rest in the illusory hopes of a Platonic affection, I must confess that I was not yet man enough to torment this woman, who lived in perpetual dread of some disaster to her children, constantly expecting some outbreak, some stormy change of mood in her husband; crushed by him when she was not distressed by some ailment in Jacques or Madeleine, and sitting by the bed of one or the other whenever her husband gave her a little peace. The sound of a too impassioned word shook her being, a desire startled her; for her I had to be Love enshrined, strength in tenderness; everything, in short, that she was for others.
And, then, I may say to you, who are so truly woman, the situation had its enchanting quietism, moments of heavenly sweetness, and of the satisfaction that follows on tacit renunciation. Her conscientiousness was infectious, her self-immolation for no earthly reward was impressive by its tenacity; the living but secret piety which held her other virtues together affected all about her like spiritual incense. Besides, I was young; young enough to concentrate my whole nature in the kiss she so rarely allowed me to press on her hand, giving me only the back of it, never the palm—that being to her, perhaps, the border line of sensuality. Though two souls never fused and loved with greater ardor, never was the flesh more bravely or victoriously held in subjection.
Later in life I understood the causes of my complete happiness. At that age no self-interest distracted my heart, no ambition crossed the current of a feeling which, like an unstemmed torrent, fed its flow with everything it carried before it. Yes, as we grow older the woman is what we love in a woman; whereas we love everything in the first woman we love—her children are our children, her house, her interests, are our own; her grief is our greatest grief; we love her dress and her belongings, it vexes us more to see her corn spilt than it would to lose our own money; we feel ready to quarrel with a stranger who should meddle with the trifles on the chimney-shelf. This sanctified love makes us live in another, while afterwards, alas! we absorb that other life into our own, and require the woman to enrich our impoverished spirit with her youthful feeling.
I was ere long one of the family, and found here for the first time the infinite soothing which is to an aching heart what a bath is to the tired limbs; the soul is refreshed on every side, anointed in its inmost folds. You cannot understand this: you are a woman, and this is the happiness you give without ever receiving in kind. Only a man can know the delicate enjoyment of being the privileged friend of the mistress of another home, the secret pivot of her affections. The dogs cease to bark at you; the servants, like the dogs, recognize the hidden passport you bear; the children, who have no insincerities, who know that their share will never be smaller, but that you bring joy to the light of their life—the children have a spirit of divination. To you they become kittenish, with the delightful tyranny that they keep for those they adore and who adore them; they are shrewdly knowing, and your guileless accomplices; they steal up on tiptoe, smile in your face, and silently leave you. Everything welcomes you, loves you, and smiles upon you. A true passion is like a beautiful flower which it is all the more delightful to find when the soil that produces it is barren and wild.
But if I had the delights of being thus naturalized in a family where I made relationships after my own heart, I also paid the penalties. Hitherto Monsieur de Mortsauf had controlled himself in my presence; I had only seen the general outline of his faults, but I now discerned their application in its fullest extent, and I saw how nobly charitable the Countess had been in her description of her daily warfare. I felt all the angles of his intolerable temper; I heard his ceaseless outcries about mere
