Just as Millet’s peasant woman strides across the melancholy field, weak yet unhesitating, individualistic, yet ever the same woman who yesterday was, to-day is, and to-morrow will be, so _L’Ensorcelée_, the large-proportioned, plain-thinking daughter of an ancient and aristocratic house, wanders home from church across the fields in spring, with the glow of an eternal flame in her honest face--the glow of a passion conceived in church when in the pulpit she descried the man whom she is proud to own as her master at the first glance. This woman is the childless wife of a rich plebeian at the time of the French Revolution; and the man--is he any different from that peasant of Millet’s who draws on his coat, standing alone on the broad plains after a hard day’s work? The mantle of an emperor in the picture of a coronation is not more imposing than this raised arm, standing in relief against the grey heavens, and commanding respect as though it were engaged in the performance of a fearful and holy action, instead of being merely the outline of a strong, rough, tired figure in a lonely field. And what is it but the peasant strength and peasant greatness of this former _Chouan_, now a priest of Barbey’s, that attracts the nobleman’s daughter, wife of the _parvenu_, when she sees him in church during the procession and catches sight of his face hidden beneath the cowl,--a face that has been unrecognisably lacerated in battle against the soldiers of the French Revolution,--at the sight of which she is consumed with a mad, wild, passionate love. She was a woman in whom her own sub-conscious strength called for the strongest man, and felt with a shudder of injured pride: This one is the strongest! And he is the strongest, for this inflexible conspirator will not allow himself to be led astray by any woman, and _L’Ensorcelée_, conscious of the destruction of her womanhood, conscious also of the ignominy of having married beneath her, drowns herself.