Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
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.
When I had, as it were, felt of his defects, I conformed to them with the same suppleness that his wife showed in soothing him. Later in life I should certainly have made him angry, but now, humble as a child, supposing that I knew nothing and believing that men in their prime knew all, I was genuinely amazed at the results obtained at Clochegourde by this patient agriculturist.
They always met politely; but there was none of that daily intercourse or that agreeable intimacy which ought to have existed between Clochegourde and Frapesle, two estates separated only by the Indre, and whose mistresses could have beckoned to each other from their windows. Jealousy, however, was not the sole reason for the solitude in which the Count de Mortsauf lived.
The Cassine and the Rhetoriere need give no anxiety; their soil was the very best in the neighborhood; the farm-houses once built, and the ground brought into cultivation, it would be quite enough to advertise them at Tours; tenants would soon apply for them. In two years' time Clochegourde would be worth at least twenty-four thousand francs a year.
Having learned by experience how the pure air and the blue sky of the lovely valley calmed the excitements and soothed the morbid griefs of the diseased mind, and what beneficial effect the life at Clochegourde had upon the health of her children, she opposed her mother's desire that she should leave it with reasons which the overbearing woman, who was less grieved than mortified by her daughter's bad marriage, vigorously combated.
The count bought what was needed for the household; the farmers and tenants, indeed, every one around Clochegourde, sent buyers to the Mignonne, a pet name which the peasantry give even to strangers, but which in this case belonged exclusively to Madeleine. Jacques was less fortunate in gathering his walnuts.
I am convinced that the habit of patience I acquired in my childhood and practised at Clochegourde had much to do in my winning the favor of the king, who was always most kind to me. He no doubt took a fancy to read my letters, for he soon gave up his notion of my life as that of a young girl.
A lifetime of anger, jealousy, and rage lay in those two months between the time my mother told me of your relations with Lady Dudley, and your return to Clochegourde. I wished to go to Paris; murder was in my heart; I desired that woman's death; I was indifferent to my children. Prayer, which had hitherto been to me a balm, was now without influence on my soul.
He then told me, with that tempered eloquence which falls like dew upon the heart, that for the last six months the countess had suffered daily more and more, in spite of Monsieur Origet's care. The doctor had come to Clochegourde every evening for two months, striving to rescue her from death; for her one cry had been, "Oh, save me!"
You know the why and wherefore of these words. My relations with the Marchioness of Dudley had a disastrous celebrity. At an age when the senses have dominion over our conduct, and when in my case they had been violently repressed by circumstances, the image of the saint bearing her slow martyrdom at Clochegourde shone so vividly before my mind that I was able to resist all seductions.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking