Poor Felicia! That life of hers was indeed a frightful desert when art did not beguile it with its illusions; a desert mournful and flat, where everything was lost, reduced to one level, beneath the same monotonous immensity, the naive love of a child of twenty, a passionate duke’s caprice, in which all was overwhelmed by an arid sand driven by blasting fates. Paul was conscious of that void, desired to escape it; but something held him back, like a weight which unrolls a chain, and in spite of the calumnies he heard, and notwithstanding the odd whims of the strange creature, he dallied deliciously after her, at the price of bearing away with him from this long lover’s contemplation only the despair of a believer reduced to the adoring of images alone. The refuge lay down there, in that remote quarter of the town where the wind blew so hard, yet without preventing the flame from mounting white and straight--it was the family circle presided over by Bonne Maman. Oh! she at least was not bored, she never uttered the cry of the “jackal in the desert.” Her life was far too full; the father to encourage, to sustain, the children to teach, all the material cares of a home where the mother’s hand is wanting, those preoccupations that awake with the dawn and are put to sleep by the evening, unless indeed it bring them back in dream, one of those devotions, tireless but without apparent effort, very pleasant for poor human egotism, because they dispense from all gratitude and hardly make themselves felt, so light is their hand. She was not the courageous daughter who works to support her parents, gives private lessons from morning to night, forgets in the excitement of a profession all the troubles of the household. No, she had understood her task in a different sense, a sedentary bee restricting her cares to the hive, without once humming out of doors in the open air among the flowers. A thousand functions: tailoress, milliner, mender of clothes, bookkeeper also for M. Joyeuse, who, incapable of all responsibility, left to her the free disposal of their means, to be pianoforte-teacher, governess.