steering his way in a course full of shoals and beset by enemies.
Also, perhaps, when he came to judge his wife coolly, he may have
discerned in her certain vices of education which made her unfit to
second him in his schemes.

A speech he made, /a propos/ of Talleyrand's marriage, enlightened the
Countess, to whom it proved that if he had still been a free man she
would never have been Madame Ferraud. What woman could forgive this
repentance? Does it not include the germs of every insult, every
crime, every form of repudiation? But what a wound must it have left
in the Countess' heart, supposing that she lived in the dread of her
first husband's return? She had known that he still lived, and she had
ignored him. Then during the time when she had heard no more of him,
she had chosen to believe that he had fallen at Waterloo with the
Imperial Eagle, at the same time as Boutin. She resolved,
nevertheless, to bind the Count to her by the strongest of all ties,
by a chain of gold, and vowed to be so rich that her fortune might
make her second marriage dissoluble, if by chance Colonel Chabert
should ever reappear. And he had reappeared; and she could not explain
to herself why the struggle she had dreaded had not already begun.
Suffering, sickness, had perhaps delivered her from that man. Perhaps
he was half mad, and Charenton might yet do her justice. She had not
chosen to take either Delbecq or the police into her confidence, for
fear of putting herself in their power, or of hastening the
catastrophe. There are in Paris many women who, like the Countess
Ferraud, live with an unknown moral monster, or on the brink of an
abyss; a callus forms over the spot that tortures them, and they can
still laugh and enjoy themselves.

"There is something very strange in Comte Ferraud's position," said