Her troubles were the more harassing because they were so mysterious, so indefinitely prolonged. They unwound themselves like the ball of red string that Madame Magloire, the confectioner in the Place Saint-Exupère, kept on her counter in a boxwood case, and which she used to tie up hundreds of little parcels by means of the thread that passed through a hole in the cover. It seemed to Madame Bergeret that she would never see the end of her worries; she even, under sadness and regret, began to acquire a certain look of spiritual beauty. One morning she looked at an enlarged photograph of her father, whom she had lost during the first year of her married life, and standing in front of it, she wept, as she thought of the days of her childhood, of the little white cap worn at her first communion, of her Sunday walks when she went to drink milk at the Tuilerie with her cousins, the two Demoiselles Pouilly of the Dictionary, of her mother, still alive, but now an old lady living in her little native town, far away at the other end of France in the _département du Nord_. Madame Bergeret’s father, Victor Pouilly, a headmaster and the author of a popular edition of Lhomond’s grammar, had entertained a lofty notion of his social dignity in the world and of his intellectual prowess. Being overshadowed and patronised by his elder brother, the great Pouilly of the Dictionary, being also under the thumb of the University authorities, he took it out of everybody else and became prouder and prouder of his name, his Grammar, and his gout, which was severe. In his pose he expressed the Pouilly dignity, and to his daughter his portrait seemed to say: “My child, I pass over, I purposely pass over everything in your conduct which cannot be considered exactly conventional. You should recognise the fact that all your troubles come from having married beneath you. In vain I flattered myself that I had raised him to our level. This Bergeret is an uneducated man, and your original mistake, the source of all your troubles, my daughter, was your marriage.” And Madame Bergeret gave ear to this speech, while the wisdom and kindness of her father, so clearly stamped on it, sustained her drooping courage in a measure. Yet, step by step, she began to yield to fate. She ceased to pay denunciatory visits in the town, where, in fact, she had already tired out the curiosity of her friends by the monotonous tenour of her complaints. Even at the rector’s house they began to believe that the stories which were told in the town about her liaison with M. Roux were not entirely fables. She had allowed herself to be compromised, and she wearied them; they let her plainly see both facts. The only person whose sympathy she still retained was Madame Dellion, and to this lady she remained a sort of allegorical figure of injured innocence. But although Madame Dellion, being of higher rank, pitied her, respected her, admired her, she would not receive her. Madame Bergeret was