The transformation scene of the Restoration was carried through with a
rapidity which bewildered the generation brought up under the imperial
regime. To me this revolution meant nothing. The least word or gesture
from Madame de Mortsauf were the sole events to which I attached
importance. I was ignorant of what the privy council was, and knew as
little of politics as of social life; my sole ambition was to love
Henriette better than Petrarch loved Laura. This indifference made the
duchess take me for a child. A large company assembled at Frapesle and
we were thirty at table. What intoxication it is for a young man
unused to the world to see the woman he loves more beautiful than all
others around her, the centre of admiring looks; to know that for him
alone is reserved the chaste fire of those eyes, that none but he can
discern in the tones of that voice, in the words it utters, however
gay or jesting they may be, the proofs of unremitting thought. The
count, delighted with the attentions paid to him, seemed almost young;
his wife looked hopeful of a change; I amused myself with Madeleine,
who, like all children with bodies weaker than their minds, made
others laugh with her clever observations, full of sarcasm, though
never malicious, and which spared no one. It was a happy day. A word,
a hope awakened in the morning illumined nature. Seeing me so joyous,
Henriette was joyful too.

"This happiness smiling on my gray and cloudy life seems good," she
said to me the next day.

That day I naturally spent at Clochegourde. I had been banished for
five days, I was athirst for life. The count left at six in the
morning for Tours. A serious disagreement had arisen between mother
and daughter. The duchess wanted the countess to move to Paris, where
she promised her a place at court, and where the count, reconsidering