Suddenly her father died. Chaverny did not succeed him. The flames of
civil war burst forth. By Chaverny's care she and her mother found
refuge in a little town of Lower Normandy. Soon the deaths of other
relatives made her one of the richest heiresses in France. Happiness
disappeared as wealth came to her. The savage and terrible face of
Comte d'Herouville, who asked her hand, rose before her like a
thunder-cloud, spreading its gloom over the smiling meadows so lately
gilded by the sun. The poor countess strove to cast from her memory
the scenes of weeping and despair brought about by her long
resistance.

At last came an awful night when her mother, pale and dying, threw
herself at her daughter's feet. Jeanne could save Chaverny's life by
yielding; she yielded. It was night. The count, arriving bloody from
the battlefield was there; all was ready, the priest, the altar, the
torches! Jeanne belonged henceforth to misery. Scarcely had she time
to say to her young cousin who was set at liberty:--

"Georges, if you love me, never see me again!"

She heard the departing steps of her lover, whom, in truth, she never
saw again; but in the depths of her heart she still kept sacred his
last look which returned perpetually in her dreams and illumined them.
Living like a cat shut into a lion's cage, the young wife dreaded at
all hours the claws of the master which ever threatened her. She knew
that in order to be happy she must forget the past and think only of
the future; but there were days, consecrated to the memory of some
vanished joy, when she deliberately made it a crime to put on the gown
she had worn on the day she had seen her lover for the first time.