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To right and left are vineyards, orchards, and a few acres of tilled land planted with chestnut-trees which surround the house, the ground falling rapidly to the Indre, where other groups of trees of variegated shades of green, chosen by Nature herself, are spread along the shore.
I do not complain. I am well! every day I plunge into the Indre and into its icy cascades, my sixty-eight years and my whooping-cough. When I am no longer useful nor agreeable to others, I want to go away quietly without saying OUF! or at least, not saying anything except that against poor mankind, which is not worth much, but of which I am part, not being worth perhaps very much myself.
I work, expecting my scrawls to light the pipes of the Prussians. But the enemy, though so near, never passed the boundaries of the "Black Valley." The department of the Indre remained uninvaded, though compassed on all sides by the foreign army; and George Sand was able to say afterwards that she at least had never seen a Prussian soldier. A sad Christmas was passed.
"To-morrow he will entirely forget all that he has said and done; you will find him kind and excellent as ever." "Do not seek to excuse him, madame," I replied. "I will do all you wish. I would fling myself into the Indre at this moment if I could restore Monsieur de Mortsauf's health and ensure you a happy life. The only thing I cannot change is my opinion.
It consists of a large square corps de logis, with a round tower at each angle, rising out of a somewhat too slumberous pond. The water the water of the Indre surrounds it, but it is only on one side that it bathes its feet in the moat. On one of the others stretches a little terrace, treated as a garden, and in front prevails a wide court formed by a wing which, on the right, comes forward.
Built upon an island, the slow flowing Indre forms a natural moat around the castle, or as Balzac expresses it more picturesquely, "This most charming and elaborate of the châteaux of beautiful Touraine ever bathes itself in the Indre, like a princely galley adorned with lace-like pavilions and windows, and with pretty soldiers on its weathercocks, turning, like all soldiers, whichever way the wind blows."
Presently we came below the bridge to a place where the Indre widens and where the fishing was going on. "Well, Martineau?" she said. "Ah, Madame la comtesse, such bad luck! We have fished up from the mill the last three hours, and have taken nothing."
Leaving Limoges on his right, he crossed the Vienne lower down the stream, and thence he led his troops over the Creuse at Argenton and over the Indre at Châteauroux. When he traversed the Cher at Vierzon, his followers rejoiced that they had at last got out of the limits of the ancient duchy of Guienne and were invading the actual kingdom of France.
"In many of the Indre districts," writes the representative on missions, "food is wanting absolutely.
Since his return to his castle, it was his custom to torment and annoy the priests whom he encountered upon his domains in such a manner, that a poor monk, surprised by him on his private road, which was by the water-side, perceived no other method of safety then to throw himself into the river, where, by a special miracle of the Almighty, whom the good man fervently invoked, his gown floated him on the Indre, and he made his way comfortably to the other side, which he attained in full view of the lord of Cande, who was not ashamed to enjoy the terrors of a servant of God.
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