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 inward consciousness 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.