came to know his sudden outbreaks of temper, his deep and ceaseless
melancholy, his flashes of brutality, his bitter, cutting complaints,
his cold hatreds, his impulses of latent madness, his childish moans,
his cries of a man's despair, his unexpected fury. The moral nature
differs from the physical nature inasmuch as nothing is absolute in
it. The force of effects is in direct proportion to the characters or
the ideas which are grouped around some fact. My position at
Clochegourde, my future life, depended on this one eccentric will.

I cannot describe to you the distress that filled my soul (as quick in
those days to expand as to contract), whenever I entered Clochegourde,
and asked myself, "How will he receive me?" With what anxiety of heart
I saw the clouds collecting on that stormy brow. I lived in a
perpetual "qui-vive." I fell under the dominion of that man; and the
sufferings I endured taught me to understand those of Madame de
Mortsauf. We began by exchanging looks of comprehension; tried by the
same fire, how many discoveries I made during those first forty days!
--of actual bitterness, of tacit joys, of hopes alternately submerged
and buoyant. One evening I found her pensively watching a sunset which
reddened the summits with so ravishing a glow that it was impossible
not to listen to that voice of the eternal Song of Songs by which
Nature herself bids all her creatures love. Did the lost illusions of
her girlhood return to her? Did the woman suffer from an inward
comparison? I fancied I perceived a desolation in her attitude that
was favorable to my first appeal, and I said, "Some days are hard to
bear."

"You read my soul," she answered; "but how have you done so?"

"We touch at many points," I replied. "Surely we belong to the small