secret part. When their cause was lost by the elevation of Napoleon,
he took refuge in the quietude of the country and domestic life,
accepting the unmerited accusations that followed him as the
inevitable reward of those who risk all to win all, and who succumb
after serving as pivot to the political machine. Knowing nothing of
the fortunes, nor of the past, nor of the future of my family, I was
unaware of this devoted service which the Comte de Mortsauf well
remembered. Moreover, the antiquity of our name, the most precious
quality of a man in his eyes, added to the warmth of his greeting. I
knew nothing of these reasons until later; for the time being the
sudden transition to cordiality put me at my ease. When the two
children saw that we were all three fairly engaged in conversation,
Madeleine slipped her head from her father's hand, glanced at the open
door, and glided away like an eel, Jacques following her. They
rejoined their mother, and I heard their voices and their movements,
sounding in the distance like the murmur of bees about a hive.

I watched the count, trying to guess his character, but I became so
interested in certain leading traits that I got no further than a
superficial examination of his personality. Though he was only
forty-five years old, he seemed nearer sixty, so much had the great
shipwreck at the close of the eighteenth century aged him. The
crescent of hair which monastically fringed the back of his head,
otherwise completely bald, ended at the ears in little tufts of gray
mingled with black. His face bore a vague resemblance to that of a
white wolf with blood about its muzzle, for his nose was inflamed and
gave signs of a life poisoned at its springs and vitiated by diseases
of long standing. His flat forehead, too broad for the face beneath
it, which ended in a point, and transversely wrinkled in crooked
lines, gave signs of a life in the open air, but not of any mental