had forgotten to sell one of his farms of considerableextent, which
his farmer had held for him by giving out that he himself was the

owner of it.
When the Lenoncourt family, living at Givry, an estate not far from

this farm, heard of the arrival of the Comte de Mortsauf, the Duc de
Lenoncourt invited him to stay at Givry while a house was being

prepared for him. The Lenoncourt family were nobly generous to him,
and with them he remained some months, struggling to hide his

sufferings during that first period of rest. The Lenoncourts had
themselves lost an immense property. By birth Monsieur de Mortsauf was

a suitable husband for their daughter. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt,
instead of rejecting a marriage with a feeble and worn-out man of

thirty-five, seemed satisfied to accept it. It gave her the
opportunity of living with her aunt, the Duchesse de Verneuil, sister

of the Prince de Blamont-Chauvry, who was like a mother to her.
Madame de Verneuil, the intimate friend of the Duchesse de Bourbon,

was a member of the devout society of which Monsieur Saint-Martin
(born in Touraine and called the Philosopher of Mystery) was the soul.

The disciples of this philosopher practised the virtues taught them by
the lofty doctrines of mystical illumination. These doctrines hold the

key to worlds divine; they explain existence by reincarnations through
which the human spirit rises to its sublimedestiny; they liberate

duty from its legal degradation, enable the soul to meet the trials of
life with the unalterable serenity of the Quaker, ordaincontempt for

the sufferings of this life, and inspire a fostering care of that
angel within us who allies us to the divine. It is stoicism with an

immortal future. Active prayer and pure love are the elements of this
faith, which is born of the Roman Church but returns to the

Christianity of the primitive faith. Mademoiselle de Lenoncourt
remained, however, in the Catholic communion, to which her aunt was

equally bound. Cruelly tried by revolutionary horrors, the Duchesse de
Verneuil acquired in the last years of her life a halo of passionate

piety, which, to use the phraseology of Saint-Martin, shed the light
of celestial love and the chrism of inward joy upon the soul of her

cherished niece.
After the death of her aunt, Madame de Mortsauf received several

visits at Clochegourde from Saint-Martin, a man of peace and of
virtuous wisdom. It was at Clochegourde that he corrected his last

books, printed at Tours by Letourmy. Madame de Verneuil, wise with the
wisdom of an old woman who has known the stormy straits of life, gave

Clochegourde to the young wife for her married home; and with the
grace of old age, so perfect where it exists, the duchess yielded

everything to her niece, reserving for herself only one room above the
one she had always occupied, and which she now fitted up for the

countess. Her sudden death threw a gloom over the early days of the
marriage, and connected Clochegourde with ideas of sadness in the

sensitive mind of the bride. The first period of her settlement in
Touraine was to Madame de Mortsauf, I cannot say the happiest, but the

least troubled of her life.
After the many trials of his exile, Monsieur de Mortsauf, taking

comfort in the thought of a secure future, had a certain recovery of
mind; he breathed anew in this sweet valley the intoxicating essence

of revived hope. Compelled to husband his means, he threw himself into
agricultural pursuits and began to find some happiness in life. But

the birth of his first child, Jacques, was a thunderbolt which ruined
both the past and the future. The doctor declared the child had not

vitality enough to live. The count concealed this sentence from the
mother; but he sought other advice, and received the same fatal

answer, the truth of which was confirmed at the subsequent birth of
Madeleine. These events and a certain inwardconsciousness of the

cause of this disaster increased the diseased tendencies of the man
himself. His name doomed to extinction, a pure and irreproachable

young woman made miserable beside him and doomed to the anguish of
maternity without its joys--this uprising of his former into his

present life, with its growth of new sufferings, crushed his spirit
and completed its destruction.

The countess guessed the past from the present, and read the future.
Though nothing is so difficult as to make a man happy when he knows

himself to blame, she set herself to that task, which is worthy of an
angel. She became stoical. Descending into an abyss, whence she still

could see the sky, she devoted herself to the care of one man as the
sister of charity devotes herself to many. To reconcile him with

himself, she forgave him that for which he had no forgiveness. The
count grew miserly; she accepted the privations he imposed. Like all

who have known the world only to acquire its suspiciousness, he feared
betrayal; she lived in solitude and yielded without a murmur to his

mistrust. With a woman's tact she made him will to do that which was
right, till he fancied the ideas were his own, and thus enjoyed in his

own person the honors of a superiority that was never his. After due
experience of married life, she came to the resolution of never

leaving Clochegourde; for she saw the hysterical tendencies of the
count's nature, and feared the outbreaks which might be talked of in

that gossipping and jealousneighborhood to the injury of her
children. Thus, thanks to her, no one suspected Monsieur de Mortsauf's

real incapacity, for she wrapped his ruins in a mantle of ivy. The
fickle, not merely discontented but embittered nature of the man found

rest and ease in his wife; his secret anguish was lessened by the balm
she shed upon it.

This brief history is in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur
de Chessel by his inwardvexation. His knowledge of the world enabled

him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde. But the
prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with

which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world. When alone in my little
bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I could

not bear to stay at Frapesle when I saw the lighted windows of
Clochegourde. I dressed, went softly down, and left the chateau by the

door of a tower at the foot of a winding stairway. The coolness of the
night calmed me. I crossed the Indre by the bridge at the Red Mill,

took the ever-blessed punt, and rowed in front of Clochegourde, where
a brilliant light was streaming from a window looking towards Azay.

Again I plunged into my old meditations; but they were now peaceful,
intermingled with the love-note of the nightingale and the solitary

cry of the sedge-warbler. Ideas glided like fairies through my mind,
lifting the black veil which had hidden till then the glorious future.

Soul and senses were alike charmed. With what passion my thoughts rose
to her! Again and again I cried, with the repetition of a madman,

"Will she be mine?" During the preceding days the universe had
enlarged to me, but now in a single night I found its centre. On her

my will and my ambitionhenceforth fastened; I desired to be all in
all to her, that I might heal and fill her lacerated heart.

Beautiful was that night beneath her windows, amid the murmur of
waters rippling through the sluices, broken only by a voice that told

the hours from the clock-tower of Sache. During those hours of
darkness bathed in light, when this sidereal flower illumined my

existence, I betrothed to her my soul with the faith of the poor
Castilian knight whom we laugh at in the pages of Cervantes,--a faith,

nevertheless, with which all love begins.
At the first gleam of day, the first note of the waking birds, I fled

back among the trees of Frapesle and reached the house; no one had
seen me, no one suspected by absence, and I slept soundly until the

bell rang for breakfast. When the meal was over I went down, in spite
of the heat, to the meadow-lands for another sight of the Indre and

its isles, the valley and its slopes, of which I seemed so passionate
an admirer. But once there, thanks to a swiftness of foot like that of

a loose horse, I returned to my punt, the willows, and Clochegourde.
All was silent and palpitating, as a landscape is at midday in summer.

The still foliage lay sharply defined on the blue of the sky; the
insects that live by light, the dragon-flies, the cantharides, were

flying among the reeds and the ash-trees; cattle chewed the cud in the
shade, the ruddy earth of the vineyards glowed, the adders glided up

and down the banks. What a change in the sparkling and coquettish
landscape while I slept! I sprang suddenly from the boat and ran up

the road which went round Clochegourde for I fancied that I saw the
count coming out. I was not mistaken; he was walking beside the hedge,

evidently making for a gate on the road to Azay which followed the
bank of the river.

"How are you this morning, Monsieur le comte?"
He looked at me pleasantly, not being used to hear himself thus

addressed.
"Quite well," he answered. "You must love the country, to be rambling