Society concerned itself much about Veronique from the day of her
marriage, for she was a boon to its curiosity, which has little to
feed on in the provinces. Veronique was all the more studied because
she had appeared in the social world like a phenomenon; but once
there, she remained always simple and modest, in the attitude of a
person who is observing habits, customs, manners, things unknown to
her, and endeavoring to conform to them. Already voted ugly but
well-shaped, she was now declared kindly but stupid. She was learning
so many things, she had so much to hear and to see that her looks and
speech did certainly give some reason for this judgment. She showed a
sort of torpor which resembled lack of mind. Marriage, that hard
calling, as she said, for which the Church, the Code, and her mother
exhorted her to resignation and obedience, under pain of transgressing
all human laws and causing irreparable evil, threw her into a dazed
and dizzy condition, which amounted sometimes to a species of inward
delirium.

Silent and self-contained, she listened as much to herself as she did
to others. Feeling within her the most violent "difficulty of
existing," to use an expression of Fontenelle's, which was constantly
increasing, she became terrified at herself. Nature resisted the
commands of the mind, the body denied the will. The poor creature,
caught in the net, wept on the breast of that great Mother of the poor
and the afflicted,--she went for comfort to the Church; her piety
redoubled, she confided the assaults of the demon to her confessor;
she prayed to heaven for succor. Never, at any period of her life, did
she fulfil her religious duties with such fervor. The despair of not
loving her husband flung her violently at the foot of the altar, where
divine and consolatory voices urged her to patience. She was patient,