Lucile and I were mutually useless. When we spoke of the world, it was of that which we carried within ourselves, a world very unlike the true world. She saw in me her protector, I in her my friend. She was seized with gloomy fits of thought which I had difficulty in dispelling: at the age of seventeen she bewailed the loss of her youth; she wished to bury herself in a convent. Everything to her was a care, a sorrow, a hurt: an expression she sought for, an illusion she entertained would torment her for months on end. I have often seen her, with one arm thrown over her head, dream without life or movement; the life that was in her ebbed to her heart, and ceased to show itself without; her very bosom no longer heaved. Her attitude, her melancholy, her beauty gave her the air of a funeral Genius. I then endeavored to console her, and the next moment was myself plunged in inexplicable despair. Lucile liked to read some pious book, in the evening, alone: her favourite oratory was the junction of two country-roads, marked by a stone cross and a poplar-tree, whose long stylus rose into the sky like a pencil. My mother, devout and quite charmed, said that her daughter reminded her of a Christian of the primitive Church, praying at the stations called _Lauræ._ My sister's concentration of mind gave birth to extraordinary intellectual effects: in her sleep, she dreamt prophetic dreams; waking, she seemed to read the future. A clock ticked upon a landing of the staircase in the main tower, and struck the hours amid the silence. Lucile, when unable to sleep, would go to sit upon a stair opposite the clock and watch its face by the light of her lamp placed upon the ground. When the two hands met at midnight and in their formidable conjunction engendered the hour of disorder and crime, Lucile heard sounds which revealed distant deaths to her. She was in Paris a few days before the 10th of August, staying with my other sisters near the Carmelite Convent, and casting her eyes upon a mirror, she gave a cry, and said, "I have just seen Death come in." On the moors of Scotland, Lucile would have been one of the celestial women of Walter Scott, gifted with second sight; on the moors of Brittany, she was no more than a lonely creature favoured with beauty, genius and misfortune. * The life which my sister and I led at Combourg heightened the exaltation natural to our age and character. Our chief pastime was to walk side by side in the Great Mall, in spring on a carpet of primroses, in autumn on a bed of dead leaves, in winter on a sheet of snow edged by the footprints of birds, squirrels, and weazels. We were young as the primroses, sad as the dead leaves, pure as the newly-fallen snow: our recreations were in harmony with ourselves.