fragile form, a powerful consolation.

Assailed by grief, and ever menaced by new emotion she was obliged to
renounce the nursing of her child; but, nevertheless, she never left him,
for she was jealous even of his nurse. She at least wished to be loved
by him. She loved him with an infinite passion. She loved him because
he was her own son and of her blood. He was the price of her misfortune
--of her pain. She loved him because he was her only hope of human
happiness hereafter. She loved him because she found him as beautiful as
the day. And it was true he was so; for he resembled his father--and she
loved him also on that account. She tried to concentrate her heart and
all her thoughts on this dear creature, and at first she thought she had
succeeded. She was surprised at herself, at her own tranquillity, when
she saw Madame de Campvallon; for her lively imagination had exhausted,
in advance, all the sadness which her new existence could contain; but
when she had lost the kind of torpor into which excessive suffering had
plunged her--when her maternal sensations were a little quieted by
custom, her woman's heart recovered itself in the mother's. She could
not prevent herself from renewing her passionate interest in her graceful
though terrible husband.

Madame de Tecle went to pass two months with her daughter in Paris, and
then returned to the country.

Madame de Camors wrote to her, in the beginning of the following spring,
a letter which gave her an exact idea of the sentiments of the young
woman at the time, and of the turn her domestic life had taken. After a
long and touching detail of the health and beauty of her son Robert, she
added: