happiness which change all the conditions of life. It resembles
childhood, careless of all that is not laughter, joy, and merriment.
Then, when life is in full activity, when its hearths glow, man lets
the fire burn without thought or discussion, without considering
either the means or the end.

No daughter of Eve ever more truly understood the calling of a wife
than Madame Claes. She had all the submission of a Flemish woman, but
her Spanish pride gave it a higher flavor. Her bearing was imposing;
she knew how to command respect by a look which expressed her sense of
birth and dignity: but she trembled before Claes; she held him so
high, so near to God, carrying to him every act of her life, every
thought of her heart, that her love was not without a certain
respectful fear which made it keener. She proudly assumed all the
habits of a Flemish bourgeoisie, and put her self-love into making the
home life liberally happy,--preserving every detail of the house in
scrupulous cleanliness, possessing nothing that did not serve the
purposes of true comfort, supplying her table with the choicest food,
and putting everything within those walls into harmony with the life
of her heart.

The pair had two sons and two daughters. The eldest, Marguerite, was
born in 1796. The last child was a boy, now three years old, named
Jean-Balthazar. The maternal sentiment in Madame Claes was almost
equal to her love for her husband; and there rose in her soul,
especially during the last days of her life, a terrible struggle
between those nearly balanced feelings, of which the one became, as it
were, an enemy of the other. The tears and the terror that marked her
face at the moment when this tale of a domestic drama then lowering
over the quiet house begins, were caused by the fear of having