“Our dear papa,” she says, “is very much taken up with his harvest. He has adopted a mode of threshing out his corn, which accomplishes in three weeks what used to occupy five or six. He works very hard all day, and is off rake in hand at daybreak. We women sit on the heaps of corn reading and working for hours together.” She describes a carnival at Nohant in 1826, four years after her marriage, when she sits up three nights a week dancing, “Obligations which have to be accepted in life.” Obligations which seem to be grateful enough to her, although she only amuses herself by the light of three candles, with an orchestra composed of a hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes. Certain disturbing elements seem however, as the year goes on, to agitate the domestic barometer. They make a journey to Bordeaux, and there the society, although not brilliant, is more attractive than that of Nohant—the prospect of returning to the “three candles and the hurdy-gurdy” seems to frighten her—and she complains of Casimir’s want of “intellectual” energy: “Paresseux de l’esprit, et enragé des jambes.” “Cold, wet, nothing keeps him at home; whenever he comes in it is either to eat or to snore.” In writing about some commissions which her mother has executed for her in Paris, she says: “Casimir asks me to express his gratitude; it is a sentiment which we can _still_ feel in common.” Rustic duties pall upon her, her appetite and health fail, she is reduced to “looking at the stars, instead of sleeping.” “My existence is passed in a complete state of mental solitude surrounded by unsympathetic, commonplace people, some of whom deface their lives by coarse inebriety.” She here alludes to her brother, Hippolyte, who destroyed his own and his wife’s happiness by his drunken habits. The only event that brightened her sadness was the arrival of a young tutor for her children, M. Jules Boucoiran, who always, as she says, remained her devoted friend and ally. She thus whimsically relates an incident small in itself, but one that made an impression on her owing to the existing circumstances: