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On this first day the count said to his wife when he reached home, "Monsieur Felix is a charming young man." That evening I wrote to my mother and asked her to send my clothes and linen, saying that I should remain at Frapesle.
Her husband was Commander Carraud, director of studies at the Military School of Saint-Cyr, and later inspector of the powder works at Angouleme. Balzac loved her as a confidential friend, who, at the same time, did not spare him the truth, and he made frequent visits to the towns where she lived, especially to Issoudun, at her chateau of Frapesle, after the Commander had gone into retirement.
We reached the great court-yard of Frapesle, where we found the others. The Comte de Mortsauf presented me very gracefully to the duchess, who examined me with a cold and reserved air. Madame de Lenoncourt was then a woman fifty-six years of age, wonderfully well preserved and with grand manners.
Himself a guest once more of the Carrauds at Frapesle in February 1838, he took advantage of his proximity to Nohant to go and see George Sand; and spent two or three days with her. On his arrival, he surprised her clad in her dressing-gown, and smoking a cigar after dinner, beside the fire, in a huge, solitary room.
When I was on the road to Frapesle I again saw her white robe shimmering in a moonbeam; then, a few moments later, a light was in her bedroom. "Oh, my Henriette!" I cried, "to you I pledge the purest love that ever shone upon this earth." I turned at every step as I regained Frapesle. Ineffable contentment filled my mind.
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.
In the year 1835 the novelist's restlessness and inability to remain long in one spot were evinced in a very marked manner. Only by repeated changes of scene was he able to carry on his work at all. After wearing himself out in a fruitless attempt to complete Seraphita in April, he fled to Madame Carraud's at Frapesle.
These moors are flat and sandy, and for more than three miles are dreary enough until you reach, through a clump of woods, the road to Sache, the name of the township in which Frapesle stands. This road, which joins that of Chinon beyond Ballan, skirts an undulating plain to the little hamlet of Artanne.
To reach the chateau of Frapesle, foot-passengers, or those on horseback, shorten the way by crossing the Charlemagne moors, uncultivated tracts of land lying on the summit of the plateau which separates the valley of the Cher from that of the Indre, and over which there is a cross-road leading to Champy.
"And a nice place, too, though a trifle damp. Happily you have stone to fill it in with, on the land that you bought of the widow Frapesle." Robelot had never seen the old justice of the peace so talkative, so familiar; he seemed a little surprised. "Three wretched pieces of land!" said he. "Not so bad as you talk about.
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