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Updated: June 17, 2025
You have influential friends, the Duc and the Duchesse de Lenoncourt, Madame de Mortsauf, Monsieur de Vandenesse. Write to them, go and see them; they might get you a situation in the royal household which would give you a thousand crowns or so; your wife could earn as much more, and perhaps your daughter also. The situation is not hopeless. You three might earn nearly ten thousand francs a year.
I fairly trembled lest he should decline to see Madame de Mortsauf in her husband's absence; but he told the man to announce us. With the eagerness of a child I rushed into the long antechamber which crosses the whole house. "Come in, gentlemen," said a golden voice.
Though the real care of the family and estate fell upon Madame de Mortsauf, the count was useful in his way; he talked with the farmers, transacted business with his bailiff, and received the rents; if she was the soul, he was the body. I now made myself her steward so that she could nurse the count without neglecting the property.
Her eyes grew moist; she rose, and then she added, in a tone of desperate entreaty, "Never write thus to me again." Monsieur de Mortsauf was very kind. The countess had recovered her courage and serenity; but her pallor betrayed the sufferings of the previous night, which were calmed, but not extinguished.
Returning along that avenue, looking back again and again at Madame de Mortsauf, as she leaned against a tree surrounded by her children who waved their handkerchiefs, I detected in my soul an emotion of pride in finding myself the arbiter of two such destinies; the glory, in ways so different, of women so distinguished; proud of inspiring such great passions that death must come to whichever I abandoned.
At this speech the king burst out laughing. Seeing him at the window, the woman and the surgeon were much frightened, for this laugh seemed to them a second sentence of death for their poor victim. But the king kept his word, and married them. And in order to do justice he gave the husband the name of the Sieur de Mortsauf in the place of the one he had lost upon the scaffold.
I soon saw the truth of what she had told me as to her secret share in the management of the family affairs, into which I became slowly initiated. After ten years' steady effort Madame de Mortsauf had changed the method of cultivating the estate.
When the count left us, such pleasure shone on my face that Madame de Mortsauf questioned me by a look of surprise and curiosity. "Henriette does exist," I said. "You love me still. You wound me with an evident intention to break my heart. I may yet be happy!" "There was but a fragment of that poor woman left, and you have now destroyed even that," she said.
He left me in a spasm of involuntary self-pity. After dinner I returned for news of Madame de Mortsauf, who was already better. If such were the joys of marriage, if such scenes were frequent, how could she survive them long? What slow, unpunished murder was this? During that day I understood the tortures by which the count was wearing out his wife. Before what tribunal can we arraign such crimes?
Seeing these sickly children beside a mother so magnificently healthy it was impossible not to guess at the causes of the grief which clouded her brow and kept her silent on a subject she could take to God only. As he bowed, Monsieur de Mortsauf gave me a glance that was less observing than awkwardly uneasy, the glance of a man whose distrust grows out of his inability to analyze.
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