"Alas! how hard are the rocks!" But it's of no use to struggle against all of those which cumber the lives of poor people like us. I must do my duty and become attached to the Marchioness. Loving her is not difficult. Every day she is more kind to me; she is really almost like a mother to me, and her fancy for petting and spoiling me makes me forget my real position. We expected to find the Marquis on our arrival, since he promised to meet his mother here. It cannot be long before he comes. As for the Duke, he will be here, I think, next week. Let us hope that he will be as civil to me in the country as he has been lately in Paris, and not oblige me to show my temper. At another time Caroline reported to her sister the opinions of the Marchioness on country life. "'My dear child,' said she to me not long since, 'in order to love the country one must love the earth stupidly, or nature unreasonably. There is no mean between brutal stupidity and enthusiastic folly. Now you know that if I have anything excitable or even sanguine in my composition, it is for the concerns of society rather than for what is governed by the laws of Nature, which are always the same. Those laws are the work of God, so they are good and beautiful. Man can change nothing in them. His control, his observation, his admiration, even his descriptive eloquence, add nothing at all to them. When you go into ecstasies over an apple-tree in bloom, I do not think you are wrong; I think, on the contrary, that you are very right, but it seems to me hardly worth while to praise the apple-tree which does not hear you, which does not bloom to please you, and which will bloom neither the more nor the less, if you say nothing to it. Be assured that when you exclaim, "How beautiful is the spring!" it is just the same as if you said, "The spring is the spring!" Well, then, yes, it is warm in summer because God has made the sun. The river is clear because it is running water, and it is running water because its bed is inclined. It is beautiful because there is in all this a great harmony; but if it had not this harmony, all the beauty would not exist.' "Thus you see the Marchioness is nothing of an artist, and that she has arguments at her service for not understanding what she does not feel; but in this is she not like the rest of the world, and are we not all acting like her, with respect to any faculty we may happen to lack? "As she was thus talking, seated on a garden bench much fatigued with the 'exercise' she had taken,--namely, a hundred paces on a sanded walk,--a peasant came to the garden gate to sell fish to the cook, who was bargaining with him. I recognized this peasant as the one who had walked before me on the day of our arrival, singing the song about the 'hard rocks.' 'What are you thinking of?' asked the Marchioness, who saw that I was observing him.