Fleur-de-Marie, if you will, personifies this benevolent influence.
The reaction to good is not so sudden as the reaction to evil; its effects are more protracted. It is something delicious, inexplicable, which gradually extends itself, calms and soothes the most hardened heart, and gives it the feeling of inexpressible serenity. Unfortunately the charm ceases.
After having seen celestial brightness, ill-disposed persons fall back into the darkness of their habitual life; the recollections of sweet emotions which have for a moment surprised them are gradually effaced. Still they sometimes seek vaguely to recall them, even as we try to murmur out the songs with which our happy infancy was cradled. Thanks to the good action with which she had inspired them, the companions of La Goualeuse had tasted of the passing sweetness of these feelings, in which even La Louve had participated; but this latter, for reasons we shall describe hereafter, remained a shorter time than the other prisoners under this benevolent feeling. If we are surprised to hear and see Fleur-de-Marie, hitherto so passively, so painfully resigned, act and speak with courage and authority, it was because the noble precepts she had imbibed during her residence at the farm at Bouqueval had rapidly developed the rare qualities of her admirable disposition. Fleur-de-Marie understood that it is not sufficient to bewail the irreparable past, and that it is only in doing or inspiring good that a reinstatement can be hoped for.
We have said that La Louve was sitting on a wooden bench, beside La Goualeuse. The close proximity of these two young girls offered a singular contrast.
The pale rays of a winter sun were shed over them; the pure sky was speckled in places with small, white, and fleecy clouds; some birds, enlivened by the warmth of the temperature, were warbling in the black branches of the large chestnut-trees in the yard; two or three sparrows, more bold than their fellows, came and drank in a small rivulet formed by the overflow of the basin; the green moss covered the stones of the fountain, and between their joints, here and there, were tufts of grass and some small creepers, spared by the frost. This description of a prison-basin may seem puerile; but Fleur-de-Marie did not lose one of the details, but with her eyes fixed mournfully on the little verdant corner, and on this limpid water in which the moving whiteness of the clouds over the azure of the heavens was reflected, in which the golden rays of a lovely sun broke with beautiful lustre, she thought with a sigh of the magnificence of the Nature which she loved, which she admired so poetically, and of which she was still deprived.
"What did you wish to say to me?" asked La Goualeuse of her companion, who, seated beside her, was gloomy and silent.
"We must have an explanation," said La Louve, sternly; "things cannot go on as they are."
"I do not understand you, La Louve."
"Just now, in the yard, referring to Mont Saint-Jean, I said to myself, 'I won't give way any more to La Goualeuse,' and yet I do give way now."