"Poor dear! poor dear!" she murmured two or three times; the words reaching my ear like a gentle breeze. When she could intervene with success she said, interrupting us, "Let me tell you, gentlemen, that you are very dull company."Recalled by this conversation to his chivalrous sense of what was due to a woman, the count ceased to talk politics, and as we bored him in our turn by commonplace matters, he presently left us to continue our walk, declaring that it made his head spin to go round and round on the same path.
My sad conjectures were true. The soft landscape, the warm atmosphere, the cloudless skies, the soothing poetry of this valley, which for fifteen years had calmed the stinging fancies of that diseased mind, were now impotent. At a period of life when the asperities of other men are softened and their angles smoothed, the disposition of this man became more and more aggressive. For the last few months he had taken a habit of contradicting for the sake of contradiction, without reason, without even trying to justify his opinions; he insisted on knowing the why and the wherefore of everything; grew restless under a delay or an omission; meddled with every item of the household affairs, and compelled his wife and the servants to render him the most minute and fatiguing account of all that was done; never allowing them the slightest freedom of action. Formerly he did not lose his temper except for some special reason; now his irritation was constant. Perhaps the care of his farms, the interests of agriculture, an active out-door life had formerly soothed his atrabilious temper by giving it a field for its uneasiness, and by furnishing employment for his activity. Possibly the loss of such occupation had allowed his malady to prey upon itself; no longer exercised on matters without, it was showing itself in more fixed ideas; the moral being was laying hold of the physical being. He had lately become his own doctor; he studied medical books, fancied he had the diseases he read of, and took the most extraordinary and unheard of precautions about his health,--precautions never the same, impossible to foresee, and consequently impossible to satisfy. Sometimes he wanted no noise;then, when the countess had succeeded in establishing absolute silence, he would declare he was in a tomb, and blame her for not finding some medium between incessant noise and the stillness of La Trappe. Sometimes he affected a perfect indifference for all earthly things. Then the whole household breathed freely; the children played;family affairs went on without criticism. Suddenly he would cry out lamentably, "They want to kill me!--My dear," he would say to his wife, increasing the injustice of his words by the aggravating tones of his sharp voice, "if it concerned your children you would know very well what was the matter with them."He dressed and re-dressed himself incessantly, watching every change of temperature, and doing nothing without consulting the barometer.
Notwithstanding his wife's attentions, he found no food to suit him, his stomach being, he said, impaired, and digestion so painful as to keep him awake all night. In spite of this he ate, drank, digested, and slept, in a manner to satisfy any doctor. His capricious will exhausted the patience of the servants, accustomed to the beaten track of domestic service and unable to conform to the requirements of his conflicting orders. Sometimes he bade them keep all the windows open, declaring that his health required a current of fresh air; a few days later the fresh air, being too hot or too damp, as the case might be, became intolerable; then he scolded, quarrelled with the servants, and in order to justify himself, denied his former orders. This defect of memory, or this bad faith, call it which you will, always carried the day against his wife in the arguments by which she tried to pit him against himself. Life at Clochegourde had become so intolerable that the Abbe Dominis, a man of great learning, took refuge in the study of scientific problems, and withdrew into the shelter of pretended abstraction. The countess had no longer any hope of hiding the secret of these insane furies within the circle of her own home; the servants had witnessed scenes of exasperation without exciting cause, in which the premature old man passed the bounds of reason. They were, however, so devoted to the countess that nothing so far had transpired outside;but she dreaded daily some public outburst of a frenzy no longer controlled by respect for opinion.
Later I learned the dreadful details of the count's treatment of his wife. Instead of supporting her when the children were ill, he assailed her with dark predictions and made her responsible for all future illnesses, because she refused to let the children take the crazy doses which he prescribed. When she went to walk with them the count would predict a storm in the face of a clear sky; if by chance the prediction proved true, the satisfaction he felt made him quite indifferent to any harm to the children. If one of them was ailing, the count gave his whole mind to fastening the cause of the illness upon the system of nursing adopted by his wife, whom he carped at for every trifling detail, always ending with the cruel words, "If your children fall ill again you have only yourself to thank for it."He behaved in the same way in the management of the household, seeing the worst side of everything, and making himself, as his old coachman said, "the devil's own advocate." The countess arranged that Jacques and Madeleine should take their meals alone at different hours from the family, so as to save them from the count's outbursts and draw all the storms upon herself. In this way the children now saw but little of their father. By one of the hallucinations peculiar to selfish persons, the count had not the slightest idea of the misery he caused.
