This is a very puerile detail, but it touched me because I felt very lonely in this great house where no person, since my arrival, had seemed to pay the least attention to me. The marquis appeared only at dinner, wrapped in a _robe-de-chambre_ and groaning over his health or politics. The marquise was occupied in making the château comfortable, and held long conferences with an upholsterer from Clermont. Count André rode in the morning, hunted in the afternoon, and, in the evening, smoked his cigars without ever addressing a word to me. The governess and the _religieuse_ looked at one another and looked at me with a discretion which froze me. My pupil was an idle and dull boy, who had the redeeming quality of being very simple, very confiding, and of telling me all that I wished to know of himself and the rest of his family. I learned in this way that their stay in the country this year was the work of Count André, which did not astonish me in the least, for I felt more and more that he was the real head of the family; I learned that the year preceding he had wished to marry his sister to one of his comrades, a M. de Plane, whom Charlotte had refused, and who had gone to Tonquin. In our two daily classes, one in the morning from eight o’clock to half-past nine, the other in the afternoon from three o’clock until half-past four, I had a great deal of trouble to fix the attention of the little idler. Seated on his chair, opposite me on the other side of the table, and rolling his tongue against his cheek, while he covered the paper with his big awkward writing, he would now and then glance up at me. He noticed on my face the least sign of abstraction. With the animal and sure instinct of children, he soon saw that I would make him go on with his lessons less quickly when he talked to me of his brother or sister, and so this innocent mouth revealed to me that there was, in this cold, strange house, some one who thought of me and of my comfort. My mother had failed so much in this regard, although I might not wish to confess it! And it was this act of simple politeness which made me regard Mlle. de Jussat with more attention. The second trait that I discovered in her was a taste for the romantic, not that she had read many romances, but as I have already told you, her sensibility was extreme, and this had given her an apprehension of the real.